SC2993

Coming home from a short drive I put the brakes on and the pedal went all the way to the floor. Luckily I was doing about 7-10 mph and in my neighborhood, the weather was about 28 degrees. Pulled the car into the driveway and noticed brake fluid under the drivers side front wheel. My car just turned 20 in January and thought that maybe the brake line had busted. Knowing that I could not drive the car I had it taken to RAC to have them look at the issue. Once they got into it they found this! Not sure how this happened on a 20 year old car with no previous brake issues, the guys at RAC are stumped too. Glad that I was not travelling fast when this happened, most likely it could have been much worse.

TMc993

Wow! I've been driving and working on cars with disc brakes for well over 40 years and have never seen anything like this on a non-competition car. You're very lucky it happened when/where it did.

ilko

This is crazy! Never seen anything remotely similar. You may want to report it to Porsche and NHTSA.

Vandit

Wow, WTF! That's a crazy failure. Was this on the face of the caliper or the backside where the line fitting goes into? Did you recover the broken piece or was that lost? What does the face of the crack/break look like? Any signs of corrosion, like something that started small and then took the whole caliper?

Steve Weiner-Rennsport Systems

Thats a first for me, too.

The forensics REALLY need to be done here to prevent other people from such failures as it may have been a faulty casting or some type of impact damage.

This is one I'd talk with Brembo about.

P-daddy

Crap! That looks like the inboard side.

Rick-A-Shay

No expert but, it looks like a clean break! Usually if a casting develops a crack, dirt will enter the crack and cause some discoloration. When the actual separation finally occurs, you can see the clean metal in the break vs. the dark area where the crack was. Just saying…… Still, rather scary!

L23FPorsche

Just a thought. If the through bolts on one side of the caliper were missing/fractured, the pistons could potentially do this.

SC2993

The crack is on the inboard side of the caliper, we looked for any sign of corrosion and did not find any indicating that there was a previous break. The caliper will be sent back to determine what happened, maybe a bad casting. The bolts that were removed were in good shape. Strange that this happened after so many years on the car with no other symptoms.

996scott

Wow, that in amazing. can't even imagine how that happens.

pp000830

My understanding is that if the casting had impact damage one can look at the texture of the crack and follow it to the initial propagation point and then look for and impact or scratch irregularity on the exterior surface of the part adjacent to the crack.

jhg41977

Wow, you are very lucky it haplened at low speed with nobody in your way!

3healey

Having suffered a total brake system failure at speed (see my avatar), this scares the crap out of me. Any news on what caused this?