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With the ultimate front brake kit now in place, our attention was turned to the rear of the car. We wanted to upgrade our rear brakes to keep balance between the front and the rear brakes, something ignored by many tuners and Brembo had a really cool off the shelf solution for us. The Brembo rear kit uses a 4 piston rear caliper that uses a pad over twice the size of the stock rear caliper. A huge 328mm or 12.9″ slotted rotor is bolted full floating style to an alloy hat with an integral parking brake drum. Since the parking brake drum is hard anodized aluminum, it is meant to be used only for emergencies or to hold the vehicle stationary when parked. For rally or drift use where the parking brakes are used to initiate slides, Brembo has a special order optional hat with a steel liner in the alloy hat. Our Evo is never going to see the dirt we hope and who the heck would waste the EVO’s sophisticated FWD system by drifting one?
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Our rear brakes are as awesome looking as the front. Many tuners neglect the rear brakes.
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Since the 4 piston caliper is so much larger than the stock caliper, the rear brakes ended up weighing 4 lbs more than stock. However we think a total weight gain of only 2 lbs total for all 4 brakes is well worth having tons of braking power. It might seem to you that all of this brake system is overkill but if you look carefully, many expensive and exotic cars of about the same weight as the Evo have the same size brakes as standard equipment.
We bled our brakes and flushed the system with Motul RBF 660 brake fluid. Motul’s RBF formula is one of the best fluids, performing nearly as well or better as uber expensive exotic stuff like the legendary F-1 brake fluid standards Castrol SRF and AP650. When brake fluid gets really hot it boils. Boiling fluid has bubbles in it that are filled with compressible gas. The compressible gas causes the brake pedal to drop to the floor. This is another type of brake fade that must be avoided.
Motul’s dry boiling point is an amazing 660 degrees F. Motul works so well that our team’s race cars need only bleed the brakes once a season, instead of the typical once a race. Most brake fluids absorb moisture from the atmosphere. When the brake fluid absorbs moisture its boiling point rapidly drops rendering it less effective. Even though the brake fluid is contained within the brake system, it still can quickly absorb a surprising amount of moisture from the atmosphere that is inadvertently drawn into the brake system. Some brake fluids can deteriorate greatly from this phenomenon with as little as one heat cycle of the brake system. Motul resists absorbing moisture from the atmosphere better than most brake fluids so its inherent high boiling point lasts longer than most fluids. If you do manage to boil Motul, surfactants in the formula cause the bubbles formed to rapidly dissipate and you get a recovery of your brake pedal feel.
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Motul brake fluid was used to flush the system and bleed the brakes.
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Our stock brakes were powerful and confidence inspiring. Our new brakes leave us speechless. The pedal is rock solid and the brakes are very easy to modulate with light pressure. Although we haven’t had a chance to try our system on the track yet, we did test the systems balance twice in panic stop mode, the first time when a cell phone addled idiot in a large SUV turned left in front of us, saw us coming, panicked, stopped and blocked the entire street leaving us no choice but to stand on the brakes and pray for the gods of friction to spare Project EVO. The mighty Brembo’s did their job, all 4 wheels being modulated by the ABS system, a sign of good balance, hauling us to stop in an amazingly short time. The second time, a street racing ricer in a slammed, 3 shades of primer, body kit falling off EG Civic saw us coming from the parking lot he was hanging out in, decided to race us and launched his car from the parking lot into the street. Unfortunately, he lost control of his car in the process and shot right into our path while understeering wildly. With eyes wide in disbelief over the utter stupidity of the above action we hit the big Brembos for all of their worth and managed to miss the idiot who then proceeded to rev on us and give us the thumbs down. Increasing our annoyance was the fact that our big gulp full of diet coke got launched out of the cupholder like a Polaris missile, exploding on our dash, soaking the HVAC and Radio controls, making a huge mess of our interior and making the next segment of Project EVO a cleaner evaluation. Both times the gummy Nitto NT01’s and the mighty Brembo brakes saved our bacon so there will be more segments of Project EVO to come!
