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What's this all about then?

Braking is a pretty simple concept, but is often misunderstood. In order for your brakes to be working effeciently, they need to be balanced, making the most of the available grip, and they need to be working at the correct temperature. Forget the massive discs and machined billet calipers with eleventy hundred pistons, if there is grip left on the table or the brakes are at the wrong temperature, then the system is crap.

This calculator is designed to be a quick check of those basic factors. Chuck you cars specs in the inputs, select your braking components and check the basic parameters of bias and temperature on the dial. You want to get all of them sitting in the green zones of the guages for your particular setup.

How does it work?

The calculator solves a complex algorithm which determines the point at which the front brake force overcomes the available traction, causing the tyres to lock up. Beyond this point, braking performance is reduced, so the point of front lock up (known as 'threshold braking') represents the maximum achievable braking performance available from a given set of parameters.

Why does this differ from other brake system calculators on the internet?

Although it's true that the tyres stop the car, the brakes are still a key point of optimisation and can affect the total braking performance by up to 50%.

Other brake calculators are open loop calculations, they will ask for a rate of acceleration or assume that 100% of the grip available is being used and take that as the acceleration, from which the load transfer and thus ideal bias ratio can be calculated. What they won't tell you is how much of that grip the brake setup is actually using, and thus what the actual rate of acceleration is, according to that particular set of parameters, meaning the actual bias can differ from the theoretical bias by a significant margin. The tool provided here is a closed loop system, it takes the tyre grip as an input and solves a circular problem where the front tyre traction is dependent on the load transfer, the load transfer is dependent on the amount of brake force, and the brake force depends on the amount of traction at the front tyre. Unlike other brake system calcliations this one will tell you how much of the brake force you can actually deploy. This calcliator also hosts some other key benefits.

• Drop down menus for common braking components, making entering your parameters a hassle free experience and requiring minimum specialist knowledge
• Thermal simulation. Using a parameter for engine power, the calculator can simulate the amount of kinetic energy converted to heat by the brakes when lapping a simulated test circuit.
• Easy to understand results. The guage system for dynamic bias and front/rear rotor temperature, presents a simple and intuitive glance at the most important aspects of the braking system.

What do the disc temperatures represent?

The vehicle is modelled to travel around an oval circuit made up of two 180 degree, 50m radius turns connected by two 400m straights. The car accelerates down the straights at a rate dependent on the power, weight and aerodynamic drag of the vehicle, and decelerates at a rate as calculated by the brake bias algorithm. Braking distances are calculated based on the speed of the vehicle and the calculated stopping distance, so the faster the car, the more the required braking distance increases. The test is designed to represent real life driving situations, where the amount of power, weight and grip of the car all affect the amount of kinetic energy being built up and dispersed as the car travels around a fixed test circuit.

Why does the braking distance get progressivly shorter if I keep adding rear brake force?

The algorithm is only set to solve for front lock up. You can continue to add rear bias past the point that the rear tyres would lock and it will continue to add to the overall brake force. I will sort this out, but for now make sure the guage stays out of the red area!