Balancing Braking

Using different friction at each end of the car can help balance your braking setup, even when there is no hydraulic brake bias adjustment available.

With the huge variety of brake pad compounds available, it's fairly simple to find the right combination of wear, temperature and torque that a driver needs for whatever he or she is racing. While that may not always be a racing pad, the existence of pads designed for racing opens up many more possibilities, even for those who race production-based cars.

The variety also makes something else possible: using different compounds front to rear to balance the braking, to help ensure that one end doesn't lock up before the other under heavy braking.

"It's almost understood that in most vehicles you don't run a square compound setup, unless you have a perfect 50/50 weight distribution or you've got a rear bias distribution," says Andie Lin, Cobalt FrictionTechnologies' director of advanced materials. "Most vehicles that are club raced don't have that kind of distribution. It really depends on the chassis of the car – is it front engine/front-wheel drive, mid-engine, front/rear...it really depends on that, the dynamics of the chassis itself. When you look at brake compound setup, it's really just one component of the entire chassis."