Project S2000 Part 4- Taking it to the Track!

One downside to going with the DS3000 pads up front and keeping the StopTech street pads on the rear was that it shifted the brake bias forward.  This would result in longer braking distances and also affect turn-in during trail braking.  The upside was that it should reduce the work load on the rear brakes, and that’s a good thing with the street pads on the rear.

We changed our brake pads, added a 3mm wheel spacer and some ghetto brake ducts.

Though the DS3000 pads are considered track-only, they are actually quite useable on the street.  They take two to three stops to get some heat into them for normal operation, but otherwise, they don’t squeal at all.  The downside to using these on the street is the accelerated rotor wear; you can hear these pads clamp down on the rotors as they make a slight noise like using some very fine grit sand paper to sand the rotors.

As we recently installed the brakes and did a fluid flush, there was no need to bleed or flush the brake fluid again.  We were not happy with the wheel-to-caliper clearance, so we added a 3mm spacer to the front wheels.  To add some more reliability to the brakes for track use, we made some creative cooling for the fronts.  We bought 10’ of 2” diameter, 350 degree neoprene ducting for about $45 and used about 5’ of it to direct air to the front brakes. 

To complete the transformation from street car to track car, we adjusted the suspension and tire pressures.  We settled on the following for a street setting:

Front:
Rebound: 7 clicks from full stiff (out of 18)
Compression: 0.50 turns from full stiff (out of 2.0)

Rear:
Rebound: 10 clicks from full stiff
Compression: 0.75 turns from full stiff

The rebound damping can be a little lacking when a hump is hit on the freeway (a few of those on the 405 here in LA), but otherwise the car is well composed and soaks up all the crap the roads here throw at it.  Yes, it does ride better than stock!  For the track however, we added 4 clicks of rebound damping to both the front and rear resulting in 3 and 6 clicks from full stiff respectively.  We left the compression alone.  For the tire pressure, we started at 36 cold on all four.

Edit: After about ten thousand miles of driving, I now have the front rebound at 6 clicks and the rear rebound at 8 clicks for street use.  I add 3 clicks front and rear for track use.

The 3mm spacers got us some improvement in spoke to caliper clearance.