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Recently Fastbrakes announced that they would start making the 11.8″ kit with the larger Wilwood Superlite caliper. The Superlite is an even more common, larger Wilwood caliper with a lightweight forged body and internal fluid passages. Like the Dynalite caliper the new Superlites have 1 3/8″ pistons for the same hydraulic proportioning.
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| The calipers have stainless pad abutments which the Ultralites lack. The abutments prevent the pad backing plate from wearing and sticking into the caliper body. The pistons are stainless steel which is a good material due to its low thermal transmittance. |
With the bigger calipers we did some calculations and found that the Superlites had a brake pad with 39% more surface area. The brake pads are also 25% thicker on the Superlite caliper. This is welcome because we were getting two race weekends on our pads max.
We were also able to fade our brakes on some tracks which forced us to use a high temperature brake pad like the Hawk HT10 or DTC70 on tracks like Cal Speedway or Buttonwillow which required heavy braking. Tracks like Big Willow didn’t get these pads hot enough to work properly so we would have to go down to Hawk Blue 9012 or HT60 for lighter braking tracks. This meant we had to have a bunch of different pads in our race inventory.
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| The 11.8″ rotors are much bigger than the 9.6″ stock parts. The two piece rotors are actually 2 lbs lighter than stock even though they are much bigger. The rotors are the same as the smaller caliper older kit. |
We also don’t like the feel of the more aggressive Hawk pads on our particular car. They have a lot of initial bite which is good on a heavier car but on our light SE-R, it felt non-linear. With the bigger pad area we felt like we could try a less aggressive pad which we hoped would also yield better rotor life. We chose Hawk DTC30’s which is actually a Rally dirt brake pad but we wanted to try them on our lighter car. The DTC30 is known for its smooth consistent torque feel and fast release which we felt was going to work well on our car.
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| For our Maxima sized rear big brake kit, we switched from stock to Hawk HP+ pads which gave us a lot more consistent rear brake action making the car easier to drive. |
