Project Toyota Tundra Part 8- Upgrading the Brakes with TRD

Project Toyota Tundra Part 8- Upgrading the Brakes with TRD

By Mike Kojima

Its been a long time since we last visited Project Tundra.  Our super truck has been performing admirable duty around MotoIQ headquarters as our company workhorse.  It has been towing cars around, toting go karts and hauling parts for the past year without complaint. Our supercharged Tundra has been flawless in performance and reliability even getting slightly better than stock fuel economy.

To make our super truck a more well rounded beast we have been wanting to upgrade the brakes.  Not that the stock Tundra is that bad.  The stock truck rocks big 14" rotors with large 4 piston front calipers.  The big stock brakes haul the Tundra down pretty well and are one of the reasons why we bought the truck in the first place.  However injecting 504 hp made things a little different.  With our truck now capable of 13 second quarter mile passes and feeling like a rolling house on steroids, we decided that a brake upgrade would be in order.  Towing a big trailer also puts a lot of stress on the brakes' system in which case you can never have too much brakes.

To increase our stopping power, we once again turned to our friends at Toyota's high performance arm TRD to get us the ultimate in brake systems.  TRD parts are wonderful as they do not affect your Toyota's warranty and since we had the big buck 100k mile factory warranty package, we did not want to void this on our workhorse.  TRD's OEM level of quality and detail always makes their parts a real pleasure to work on as well.  Everything fits perfect and flat out works.  Check out some of the details of our kit.

The size of the TRD bake kit dwarfs just about anything we have even seen on any sort of civilian vehicle.  Of course we are not used to seeing stuff that can stop a GVW of 18,000 lbs like a fully loaded Tundra towing a trailer can be.  Car stuff simply looks wimpy compared to this.  Look at the size of Jeff's beer compared to the size of the parts!  The box the kit came in probably weighs over 80 lbs and has a weight warning on it.

The front rotor is a massive 406mm in diameter by 35mm thick.  This dwarfs the huge brakes on a R35 GTR which are a mere 380mm.  These rotors are huge and heavy.  On non friction surfaces, the rotors are e-coated to resist rust.  We are speechless on the overall size of these things, check out the beer can!

The front rotors have an aero vane configuration.  This ensures pumping of cooling air through the rotor and increases the inertial fin surface area of the rotor to provide good cooling.

The caliper is also massive, massive massive!  It is a six piston design with staggered piston diameters to reduce taper wear.  The caliper body is machined from a forging for extra strength.  The caliper has dust seals unlike typical race calipers for a long service life.  The huge caliper holds equally huge brake pads.