Quoting cheekychimp:
Shane,
What wheels are you running or intending to run? As you know you can spend a huge amount of money on brakes or you can look at much cheaper setups. I don't really advocate skimping money on brakes, but at the same time the most expensive setups are not always the best for street cars. Remember, a track only car may never see wet weather never mind road salt.
Different pads can give better braking performance but this usually comes at the expense of additional noise, additional brake dust and/or shorter rotor life. Again I stress brakes can save lives so don't skimp on performance but if your setup is so damn noisy your girlfriend refuses to get in the car or you don't want to drive the car because you are scared of getting your nice white wheels dirty again it starts to detract from the whole pleasure of driving. Worse still if you are on a budget and end up prematurely wearing out your rotors and don't have money to replace them you could end up with worse braking performance than stock.
The stock brakes are not bad. If you are not satisfied with the performance, chances are you are either no longer 'stock' and are running power levels that are over running the factory brakes or you have failing components in your system. Before you splash out on Brembos, custom brackets and new 'racing formula' pads, you would be well advised to properly flush and bleed your system, replace your aging brake fluid with new stuff of the appropriate DOT standard and replace any worn lines, master cylinders etc. Once my cars are running smoothly, one of the first things I ever address is the brakes, BEFORE I start making the car faster. It still amazes me as a cop how many idiots increase power levels to double or three times that of their stock car and never upgrade the brakes, well unless you call racing red caliper paint and taking a hand drill to the stock rotors 'upgrades'.
If you do need better than stock performance you essentially need to increase friction. You can do this by adding more pots i.e. larger calipers or increasing the rotor size. Ideally you should do both. If you are using stock wheels however you can't really increase rotor size much. You can move to larger calipers but whereas going from a single to a double caliper can make quite a difference and might work without increasing your rim size you will find that moving up to four or six pot calipers gets almost impossible with a stock sized wheel.
More friction creates more heat. Braking is transferring energy and that energy has to go somewhere. Larger rotors dissipate heat better, so do slotted and perforated rotors. Notice I use the term perforated as I do not believe you should ever drill a rotor. Genuine perforated disks are usually cast from molds that incorporate the holes so that no stress fractures are incurred during the manufacturing process. Drilling can easily cause stress fractures or make the rotors more susceptible to developing them. For a street car, slotted rotors are in my opinion far superior and far more reliable. You will most likely get different opinions on this and in truth in general daily driving duties, drilled rotors will most likely serve you without any issues. If however you do run too hot, stress fractures can cause a rotor to crack and even disintegrate and chances are if that happens you are going to be going fast, braking hard, and coming up to some sort of hazard whether it be a bend or the back of a semi and believe me that is not the time to find out you made the wrong choice.
The cheapest efficient brake setups are generally created by going to larger 'stock' setups from other makes or models of cars. It's generally cheaper to just go with bigger rims and fit rotors and calipers from a bigger or more powerful car. Alternatively you can look for brakes from newer cars working on the basis that brakes have benefited from advances in technologically over the years just like most other mechanical components. Consequently you will see setups on the VR4 from the Mitsubishi 3000 GT, muscle cars like Camaros and Mustangs and from later model EVOs.
My advice to you is to get your stock brake system in tip top shape with a thorough overhaul of all it's parts. Replace any worn components and put in fresh brake fluid and bleed the system. Start your list of upgrades with the booster from a 3KGT and look at using a master from something like a Q45. Research good street pads and if you can, invest in some slotted or better quality rotors. If that is still not enough, you need to go bigger. So called big brake setups do not have to be very expensive but in general, they will require bigger rims.
Just in case you haven't got the hint yet, there are a lot of guys on here running very well maintained stock (or close to stock) setups that likely stop better than guys running huge rotors and fancy racing heritage calipers on worn out and ill maintained brake systems that don't produce enough hydraulic pressure to operate the stock calipers efficiently never mind multi pot 'racing' ones.
Capish?
Good read, thanks for the clarification and options I have, I run on 17x7 ADR wheels that came with my car. ( lop sop chow yerng rims if you ask me) I dO have the Evo viii suspension with tanabe lowering springs on the car, and will order the ss lines from GW along with the hawk hps pads. I saw GW had slotted fronts as well, do rear brakes have to be just as good as the fronts?