Project C7 Corvette Stingray Z51: Improving Stopping With a Chevy Performance Big Brake Upgrade Kit

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The monoblock construction greatly improves stiffness, which helps pedal feel and response under ABS operation. The caliper also has this large anti-rattle clip that applies tension to the top of the brake pads to keep them from freely banging around in the caliper and making excessive noise.

Note that the piston diameters are staggered, with the leading pistons smaller than the trailing pistons. This is to prevent taper wear of the pads, as the leading edge of the brake pads tend to wear faster.

You can see the pistons have dust seals. Racing calipers do not have these, as they tend to burn up with extended track use, but they are helpful in long-term use on the street to keep dirt and brake dust out of the seals.

The pistons are equipped with radiator/heat shields. These are the metal discs made from stainless steel that contact the brake pads through a raised ring that have holes drilled annularly around their edge. These protect the caliper by reducing the heat transfer to it from the pads.

These rotors are not the same as the optional carbon ceramic Z06 brakes. Those rotors are extremely exotic and expensive. The main advantage of the carbon ceramic rotors is that they are much lighter than iron rotors, and they make very little brake dust on the street.

The Chevy Performance rotors are iron. For hardcore track use, iron rotors and race pads can work better than the carbon ceramic rotors and their special OEM pads. With iron rotors, the pad compounds can be tailored to the intended use. Carbon ceramic rotors tend to transfer more heat to the caliper as well. Many people whose cars come with carbon ceramic rotors use them on the street and switch to iron rotors and race pads for serious track driving.

The rotors have curved grooves in the friction surface. The grooves help evacuate vaporized pad material from the rotor pad interface zone.  This helps improve the bite of the brake pads under hard use and also helps reduce the affects of water on the rotor.

Pillar vanes can sometimes reduce brake judder on street driven cars due to the staggered supports inside the rotors being resistant to rotor surface distortion, although some feel that the cooling is a little bit worse than with radial vanes found in racing rotors. In any case, the rotors are so much bigger, we don’t think rotor cooling is going to be an issue, even with hard track use.