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Summer Sale 2021: AP Racing Brake Kits and Ferodo Brake Fluid!
Hello Gents,
We're kicking off summer with big savings on AP Racing by Essex Road Brake Kits! From Memorial Day (May 31st) through the first day of summer (June 20th), we are offering 20% off all Road Brake Kits, a deal we've never offered before. If you're unsure whether a Road Kit is the proper choice for your car, please visit our page, "Which type of AP Racing Brake Kit is right for me?"
Below are our fitments for the 991. These front and rear kits will fit all variants of the non-GT 991.1 and 991.2 trim levels: Base, T, S, 4S, GTS, etc. (If you have multiple Porsches, these kits also fit just about every variant of the 992, 997, 987, 981, 718, etc.). That means you could swap our brake kit across cars as required, or take your brake kit with you when you sell your current car and move on to your next 911.
Front= https://www.essexparts.com/ap-racing...-boxstercayman
Rear= https://www.essexparts.com/essex-des...91-997-718-981
During this time we'll also be offering 25% off the outstanding Ferodo Super Formula Brake Fluid. With an excellent dry boiling point (626°F) and suitability for both road and track use, Super Formula is an excellent choice for road cars, track cars, or dual-purpose road / track cars.
No coupon codes are required during this promotion, and discounted pricing will appear on our site starting on May 31st. Availability on some of the brake kits will be limited, so be sure to visit our site on the 31st to secure yours.
Our physical office location will be closed on Memorial Day (5/31), but online orders will be available. We'd encourage you to please place your order online, and if you need any assistance we'll be sure to lend a helping hand when we're back in the office on Tuesday 6/1. If you have any questions beforehand, feel free to contact us at 704-824-6030 or sales@essexparts.com
Customer Spotlight
Our Radi-CAL Road Kits have been gaining substantial momentum since their debut last year. The gigantic J Hook Discs (380mm at both ends) draped by gorgeous red, black, or silver painted calipers make these kits an obvious solution for drivers with dual-purpose road and track vehicles. Below are a couple customer success stories.
Porsche 991.2 Carrera
The twin turbocharged Porsche 991.2 models have especially enormous performance potential (particularly when the boost is increased), but the factory brakes just can't keep up. Not only that, but the tiny OEM brakes look weedy behind 20" wheels! This owner upgraded to our front and rear Road Kit to remedy the situation.
Porsche 992 Carrera 4S
When released in 2020, the 992 took the 911's performance envelope yet another step beyond all past offerings. Our client's first visit to the racetrack forced him to baby the brakes, cutting both his level of fun and his lap times. Our Road Kit put him back on track in both style and function. Read his impressions on the Essex Blog.
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'09 Carrera 2S, '08 Boxster LE (orange), '91 Acura NSX, Tesla Model 3 Performance, Fiesta ST
Jeff Ritter
Mgr. High Performance Division, Essex Parts Services Essex Designed AP Racing Radi-CAL Competition Brake Kits & 2-piece J Hook Discs Ferodo Racing Brake Pads Spiegler Stainless Steel Brake Lines
704-824-6030 jeff.ritter@essexparts.com
Last edited by JRitt@essex; 05-27-2021 at 10:21 AM.
The standard rotor sizes on the 991.2 Carrera S are 350mm front / 330mm rear. Your road kit ups the size of both of them to 380mm front/rear. In trying to understand braking bias, it seems like this would change the brake bias and shift it more rearward than the OEM setup. How does this affect braking overall, especially in a track environment?
The standard rotor sizes on the 991.2 Carrera S are 350mm front / 330mm rear. Your road kit ups the size of both of them to 380mm front/rear. In trying to understand braking bias, it seems like this would change the brake bias and shift it more rearward than the OEM setup. How does this affect braking overall, especially in a track environment?
Good question! Brake bias and balance are a confusing and messy topic. I've been involved in about 743 discussions on this topic over the past 20 years participating in various automotive forums. After 43 pages of discussion, people still tend to walk away a bit confused!
The three factors that impact brake torque are:
Disc effective radius/diameter- How far does the caliper sits away from the hub? As the caliper is pushed further out, the lever arm gets longer/there is a brake torque increase with all else held equal.
Total caliper piston area- As the overall piston area increases, there is a greater clamp load on the disc with all else held equal.
Mu (coefficient of friction) of the brake pads- How much friction do the pads generate? As the mu increases there is an increase in brake torque with all else held equal. Pad mu is typically held constant in all discussions of swapping out calipers and discs, with the assumption that the same brake pad compound can be run in the OEM brake calipers or the aftermarket ones. A major complication with the mu value of a brake pad is that it is constantly changing with temperature. It usually rises step-wise with heat until the pad compound's fade point/max operating temperature is reached, at which point the pad no longer generates much friction.
Our Road and Competition Brake Kits are all designed to very closely mimic the OEM brake torque output at both ends of the car. That is accomplished by carefully and concurrently sizing the discs and caliper pistons. One is not altered without taking the other into consideration. For example, if we increase the disc diameter in our front kit vs. stock, we decrease the overall piston area to produce the same overall torque output as the factory setup. As such, installing our front kit on your car while leaving the rear stock would only have a negligible impact on brake bias. In most cases, the shift in brake bias is only in the 2-3% range. To put that in perspective, installing a more aggressive racing brake pad compound in your factory front calipers (and heating them to track temps) while leaving everything in the rear alone, would typically have a greater impact on brake bias than installing our front kit while using the same front pad compound you were using previously.
More specifically to your point regarding an asymmetrical increase in disc size at one end of the car. On your car for example, the increase in disc size vs. stock is larger in the rear 330mm --> 380mm vs. the front (350-->380mm). Having proper brake torque and balance is just a matter of having the proper piston bores in the rear to counteract the larger relative increase in disc diameter. The ABS system is programmed using a specific torque output based on the disc sizes, caliper piston sizes, master cylinder, etc. There is a fairly narrow window in which all these parameters must fall, and that window has shrunk as ABS systems have become more sophisticated. If you were to install a combination of disc size and piston bores that diverges too far from stock, the ABS system can go into a tizzy. This is something we often seen when people take the OEM brakes off of one model or trim level and put them on a different model or trim level for which those brakes were not designed. In the Porsche world, it's usually someone trying to apply GT3 brakes to a lower trim level. In the BMW world, it's someone trying to install Mercedes AMG brakes on an e92 M3. In the Subaru BRZ world, people try to install larger WRX STI brakes on their car to gain more heat capacity. When that is done however, there is no adjusting the pistons sizes. The components are what they are, and when mated to a disc of a given size, the brake torque output is not variable. Our situation is a bit different however. We have a range of calipers that appear identical on the outside, but have slight variances in the piston sizes. As such, we can tailor our systems to match specific brake torque outputs as needed.
When people install the OEM brake components from another car, they are many times trying to achieve an increase in brake heat capacity, which is the fundamental reason for upgrading to a big brake kit in the first place. While in many of these cases the calipers and discs will physically bolt onto the car without any modifications, that doesn't mean they will actually be optimized on the chassis in question! Blindly slapping a bunch of larger components on the car without considering the brake torque output at both ends of the car is a recipe for issues. If the combination of disc and caliper piston sizing diverges too far from what was initially installed on the vehicle in question, the result is typically premature ABS intervention, longer stopping distances, etc. In other words, the brakes may look cool, fill the wheels, and even provide a larger heat sink. However, if the brake torque doesn't match what was on the car in the first place, they can be a substantial step backwards in terms of performance.
When done properly with the correct components however, a big brake kit not only provides the increased heat capacity one is typically seeking in larger brake components, they also offer superior response, stopping distances, ABS intervention, etc.
Here's a video we shot on our brake kit design process. In this case I'm speaking about our Competition Kits, but the same things all apply to our Road Kits as well:
Any weight savings? I saw the rear is about the same as OEM; how about the front?
No weight savings on the front. Our front is actually several pounds heavier. We take the disc from a 330 or 350x34mm disc to a 380x36mm disc...a huge increase in thermal capacity. The caliper is also significantly larger than the smaller OEM four piston...two additional pistons, the pads are larger, etc. The pic below isn't the greatest, but this illustrates the size difference between a front OEM 991 Carrera T disc and our prototype 380mm.
I don't have any side-by-side with the calipers, but here are a couple shots. The AP calipers are much more formidable. Another note on these...the AP Racing calipers don't need to be removed for a pad change, whereas these stockers do...big convenience benefit!
As wilmaya states above, the pricing on the site will be adjusted on May 31st. The discounted pricing will be:
Front= $3519.20
Rear= $3279.20
That also includes about $500 worth of front and rear Ferodo DS2500 brake pads, which come with the kit. Also, Ferodo Super Formula fluid will be on sale as well, so it's a great chance to get a killer brake package at a nice price.
We've had them under several variants of Porsche OEM wheels, but there are a lot of options across the generations of cars (and this fits the Boxster/Cayman chassis as well). As such, your best bet is to check your specific wheels for fitment using our downloadable wheel fitment templates:
Thanks for the order Doug! I expect your order will ship by tomorrow at the latest, so you should have it before next weekend. Thanks again, and please be sure to post some pics and feedback once you have them installed!
05-27-2021, 10:09 AM
Summer Sale 2021: AP Racing Brake Kits and Ferodo Brake Fluid!
