Just joined the forum. I have a question regarding brake kits and which kit would be a good upgrade from the standard OEM discs and pads? The only ones I’ve been recommended so far is the “EBC Stage 4 Signature Disc Brake Kit S4KF1264”. I have a 2006 3.5 LT Monte Carlo. Thanks in advance.

 

I guess the question is what is your ultimate need? As I understand, the 2006-2007 Monte has dual piston front calipers (which is an upgrade many do with 2000-2005 Montes). Are you just looking for better performing pads and rotors? If so there are a lot of options and much of those is dictated by the material. I am using nothing fancy cast rotors and ceramic pads (because they are lower dust) and I have been happy with those on all my cars.

 

This is a great question. There is no 'free lunch' on brakes as everything is always a tradeoff. Better performance is often a trade for one or more of: higher cost, higher dust, more noise, faster pad wear, more rotor wear. Towards the more extreme end, better performance when hot comes with worse performance when cold.

Assuming this is for a street car/ daily driver - can it already lock the tires on dry pavement? If so, perhaps tires should be a parallel consideration as upgrading to brakes with much more friction can ultimately lead to just locking wheels / engaging abs higher in the pedal travel. It can certainly improve back to back hard braking capability, but most street cars don't ever do 2 hard stops from high speed back to back for that to even matter.

I'm a huge fan of these (been using Centric brand blanks on my cars for years).

I used to buy into the marketing hype that drilled and or slotted = race car performance. I got D+S rotors all around on my monte, and ran into cracking issues in very short time.

When I got into the vette scene, I started getting more into racing and noticed that a lot of people seriously tracking their cars were running regular blank rotors. That baffled me as I thought there was some major track performance advantage (from the wbody street car scene of course, lol). They simply weren't seeing benefits to them to make it worth the added cost. As rotors are a wear item, it adds to the cost of tracking the car. Although the most minute improvements are worth it to a pro racer with money on the line trying to shave any time at all off of each lap, its not necessarily relevant to the 'rest of us'.

So when I started building my vette up, I took the same approach- high quality pads matched to my application, and Centric blank rotors. Ive had absolutely 0 issues from them. Granted I don't do road course racing, so they're not getting enormous amounts of heat, but I do regularly do 1/2 mile racing where they're coming down from roughly 170 every run (sometimes being hot lapped). Ive also had runs with other cars (in a controlled test environment of course) from anywhere from 30 to 60 starting up to 150 or so in some cases up to 5 back to back runs - again with 0 issues.

That's really cemented for me that ultra fancy rotors just aren't necessary for the vast majority of cars, and certainly never on a street only car. Things just never get hot enough for the supposed benefits to be realized.

 

Also, as Maniac mentioned, there are other options out there as well going bigger and better. The GP GXP had the best OEM brakes available on a wbody, so lots of people start there to swap parts on.

Beyond that, people have done CTSV 4 piston calipers (or Camaro or ATS) with 14" GT500 rotors up front with high performance pads - and upgrade like that would be plenty for even serious track work.

Bigger rotors help on two fronts by both increasing the leverage of the pads by mounting them further out and by adding rotor mass which helps reduce rotor temperatures by spreading the same heat input across a larger part.

Of course for a street car, plenty of people are happy enough with just a simple pad swap to something a bit more aggressive.

 

You bring a "funny" topic. I used to do a LOT of autocross racing (was once a month or more during the summer for a few years). I was not into as much car modding as I do now.... But, interesting thing, I and a lot of people I ran with at these events, stock spec brakes OR at most, higher performance brake pads. And they all did great. In autocrossing, I think the biggest factors was tires and overall suspension (brakes DO play a factor, but usually not usually as high a priority as the others). I used to run my 1984 Camaro and when I spun a rod bearing, I took my daily (at the time a 1994 Grand Am). Fun times! Kinda miss those days!

As a side note, something I find "funny" in the world of GM cars and brake parts. W-Body and N-Body (mostly Grand Am/Alero) have a common swap to F-Body dual piston calipers. Something I found intriguing last summer, looking at a front brake pad for my 2004 Grand Am vs a Monte front pad. They are VERY CLOSE to the same size. The biggest difference is the Grand Am pad has significantly less material contact to the rotor. Using parts store rotor differences, the Grand Am rotor is about 1 inch smaller in outside diameter to the Monte. I know the Grand Am has the same wheel lug pattern (I am running Grand Prix torque spoke wheels on my Grand Am with the Grand Am sized tires). I should soon have an extra set of Monte front calipers. I was scratching my head wondering "would I notice a change in braking performance using the Monte front calipers on the Grand Am with correct rotors and pads". I know, many would ask "why not go full f-body swap" and my answer is because I really don't feel I need it, this would be me doing it because I had the resources (and if I did, I would do it during pad/rotor swap time).
Just silly ideas. Now, why I find it "funny". GM makes so many parts that interchange between vehicles and helps keep production costs low, why not use the same caliper/rotor setup on the N and W platform cars? Is there truly a cost savings in the N body design vs the W-body (my guess is "yes").

 

Its amazing how much pull the bean counters have when it comes to saving even the tiniest amount of money. I do get cost is important for a budget oriented brand like Chevy though.

There have been several discussions on this with the c6 related to brakes. Both the Z51 (the track pack pack for the base model) and the Z06 (the track focused model) have drilled brakes with directionally vented rotors. Funny thing is that the finance folks made engineering trim costs that resulted in only allowing them to make rotors for one side instead of both. This causes the brakes on one side to be installed with the vents spinning backwards, making them mostly useless.

There was discussion with the lead engineer years after the fact and he confirmed it was a finance decision to save half the costs of rotor molds. But he also said it was low hanging fruit to trim as the external air cooling ducts provided the vast majority of the cooling for track use anyways (vs the rotor venting).

 

And it is even worst when you look at the time of GM's big financial crisis. Just look at the w-body and the hatch to the fuel pump. In 2005, no more hatch. Clearly added cost and not enough gain to justify.

In your corvette example, I am almost surprised they bothered with slotted rotors.

In my N vs W body brakes, I would have almost thought giving N-Bodies the same brakes as W-Body would be ideal to make one rotor, pad, caliper setup that handles all those cars (less R&D and design time). Heck, if I recall in the W-body, Monte front rotors are different then Grand Prix rotor. Why? Seems silly and more costly.

 

The (unconfirmed) speculation seems to be that all of the higher end exotics were doing it at the time, so it was seen as a 'must have' to be taken seriously as a track focused model (especially since its one of the few externally visible items of a track package). Of course this was before carbon rotors were a big thing / the ZR1 came along.

I am surprised that they didn't shift to straight internal vents as some aftermarket drilled rotors use (vs being curved forward vs back). Perhaps they were already locked in with the supplier for one side, but not the other - who knows. I get the feeling from the lead engineer that the main driver for cooling by far was the brake air ducts (which is notably improved on the Z06 model with the larger air scoops) so perhaps it wasn't worth their effort to alter the rotors at all from there?

I agree - that is very bizarre. You'd figure even standardizing on a better part would yield cost savings due to economy of scale (rather than splitting the buys up between different levels). You're right about the size difference, between GP and Impala / Monte, lots of people did the upgrade for the extra 0.75" or so of rotor.

 

Sorry it’s taken so long to reply. I’ve been figuring out more or less what I’m trying to do with my Car. Unfortunately I only have an LT 3.5 liter so that limits the modifications I can make in the sort term. I landed on these EBC Stage 2 brake discs https://www.summitracing.com/parts/ebc-s2kr1157 . My car is currently at 211 HP so my plan is to upgrade my brakes and buy a K&N 33 Performance Air Filter. Do the discs and calipers need to be the same brand? I was considering these Power Stop calipers if that’s the case https://www.summitracing.com/parts/p...arlo/year/2006

 

The rotor brand does not have to be the same as the brand of the pads. But depending what you are doing depends on materials you might want to go for. But I still don't know what you are up to? Such as, are you autocrossing your monte and need high performance brakes to handle all the intense braking that autocross could push on the car? Are you planning to add another 100+ HP with a custom turbo and concerned you need more braking power? Are you unsatisfied with the present brakes on the car and looking for something to better fit a daily driver for longevity and/or slightly improved braking performance?

I have two Montes (a 2000 and 2004) that came equipped with the L36, non-supercharged 3.8, factory claims about 200HP, they come with single piston calipers. The 2004 just got a Novi Paxton supercharger bolted up last year (and I am going to guess at peak is comfortably over 200whp), stops fine unless you are going at Ludicrous Speed (but even then, it is not so much my brakes as the suspension, the car brakes fine, but that sucker is a bit floaty at high speeds, so if I am looking to make an upgrade it's in my suspension to improve control before my brakes).