(engine revving)
- [Man] Oh, you got it, keep going, keep going!
- $450 break upgrade kit--
- Versus $4,400 Big Brake Kit.
- Does more expensive mean more better?
- Let's find out.
I sure hope so.
(laughing)
(exciting music)
- Hey, guys, we made a show called Car Wars.
The Donut gang going against
some of your favorite YouTubers, like ChrisFix.
Loser had to eat a very spicy chip.
Very spicy but very fun to watch.
The hardest challenge was the VR third-person driving.
I almost threw up 'cause I got motion sickness.
(gags) (laughs)
(beep) We bought two
almost identical Nissan 350Zs
and we've been modifying them to be fun daily drivers
that you can take to the track.
- My Z gets a ton of really expensive parts
and Nolan's car gets a bunch of cheap ones.
- We're gonna test them side by side
and see which components are worth
spending your hard-earned money on.
- So far we've installed coilovers
and new wheel and tire combos on our twin 350Zs, and today,
we're movin' onto the brakes.
We wanna see what kinda results we can get
from a really basic but still good brake upgrade
versus a full monty, daddy I'm going into credit card debt
for this brake kit brake kit.
Look how much bigger my pads are than yours.
- And these are my front pads.
Size comparison.
That's pretty enormous.
The Big Brake Kit doesn't necessarily mean
more braking power, it's just that you'll be able
to do harder braking for longer
because the heat is being distributed
over a larger area than mine.
With these tiny little guys,
I think I'm gonna have some pretty gnarly brake fade
after stepping on 'em a lot, many times,
a lot of many times.
- Also look how much bigger the vents are
on the Wilwood kit versus Nolan's.
A lot more air's gonna pass through those
and it's gonna cool the brakes a lot better.
We're just fightin' heat and we are gonna come out on top.
- Honestly, I think his baller-ass setup
is gonna blow mine away.
- This is honestly the best day of my life.
- No contest which is better.
(laughing)
- You never know!
I mean, yeah!
Looks like mine is almost certainly 1,000% better,
but let's just wait and see if the Wilwood kit
is really so much better
that it's worth those thousands of dollars.
(hiphop music)
Brakes.
- Big or small?
- That is the question.
- Today we have the answer. - We're gonna find out.
(beep)
- [Narrator] When upgrading your brake kit,
there are a handful of different pieces
you can opt to replace.
Rotors, pads, calipers, brake lines, and brake fluid.
On high car, we're swappin' out all of those.
In the low car we'll do the same, except for calipers.
Because new calipers are just too dang expensive for Nolan
and his poor team.
- And all that together should make our brakes firmer
and more consistent at the track.
Upgraded rotors can help dissipate heat
with more effective venting, added slots,
and/or increased surface area.
- Know what I mean? - Power tools, baby!
- Me, I'm just a car boy.
(tool buzzing)
(laughs)
(tool buzzing)
- You got what, 12 bolts here?
- I can't keep track of that in my head so as we torque 'em
we'll mark 'em and then well, once they're all marked,
they're all torqued.
My brake rotor won't fit with this dust shield on there.
To get it off we can either take the whole hub off
or do some custom engineering.
(tools buzzing)
- The other part of being bigger
is that a larger friction ring
allows you to run a larger pad.
- [James] Upgraded pads can be made
with more heat-tolerant materials,
and bigger pads also dissipate heat easier
with their larger surface area.
But in order to have bigger pads, you need bigger calipers.
- It needs force all across it.
This is a single-piston caliper.
If you're pushing on the back of this pad with one piston,
you don't have any force on the sides,
so you need a big circle?
No, you can't do that!
So you do a few little circles.
So this has pistons on both sides,
inside and behind that pad, and since this is a fixed rotor,
without the sliding piece this thing doesn't flex at all,
so you get a really firm, really consistent brake pedal.
- Got the new Wildwood 10.
Hold on, hello?
What's up, babe?
I'm at the shop.
Yeah, the boys are here.
Yeah, we're kickin' it, yeah we're havin' fun!
Yeah we're building the HiLow Zs.
Oh. (laughs)
Ooh, maybe.
Well, I think we can arrange that.
(laughs)
Yeah, I'll be home late.
(kisses)
(upbeat music)
- With all this other stuff
we also replaced the brake lines,
that's usually a part of the Big Brake Kit.
Because stock lines are often this soft and durable
and flexible rubber, which is great for daily driving
and it's great for longevity,
but it's not great for performance.
Over time these can bulge,
especially with really high, heavy braking,
and that gives you a squish in your pedal
where you shouldn't have one.
So to correct that, most Big Brake Kits,
including this Wilwood kit, come with stainless steel lines.
- Once you got your other line in place,
you break lose the OEM hard line
with the line wrench right here,
and then as quickly as possible
you're gonna shove it back on.
So the reason I leave the old line in there
is because it's good to have reference points.
If this line actually goes on the front,
it could be too long and then it could get tangled
in some of the working suspension components,
causing some pretty bad or catastrophic failures.
- All right, so we got all the brakes installed,
all the lines on, we're ready to put our new fluid in
and bleed 'em.
- [Aaron] So since we changed the brake lines,
you're gonna have to bleed the brakes.
- Yeah, 'cause all that brake fluid you saw
drippin' out of the lines has to be replaced by something
and that something is usually air.
Every time I press the brake,
Aaron's gonna be releasing air from the system.
We do that on all four corners and then our system
will be free of air and we can drive this thing.
- We don't have a bleeder here in the shop
so I went ahead and made one out of a can
and a clear tube that we had here just lyin' around.
And we're tight.
That should be it.
How does it feel?
- Ah, dude, it's like...
It's so solid.
It's like, yeah,
I shouldn't be jammin' it like that, should I?
(funky music)
- [James] After your new pads and rotors are installed,
you're still not done.
You have to bed in the brakes.
- Oh no.
Here we go.
- [James] Start at 60 miles an hour
and lightly press on your brakes to get them up to temp.
Then get back up to 60 and stand on the brakes hard
down to around 10 miles per.
- Oh wow. - That's better.
- Wow, that was really great.
- [James] Then get back up to 60
and do it again about 10 times.
- Oh hell yeah, dude.
- Wow. - This thing
frickin' gets down.
- Your brake rotors and pads are gonna get super hot
and smell, just like Nolan.
If you don't bed in your brakes,
you run the risk of having uneven pad deposition,
which makes your rotors feel like they're warped.
(funk music)
Well Nolan's out there racing S Chassis already.
- Makin' friends. - Makin' friends.
He's already part of the JDM community.
- This might be another con.
Your time.
- Yeah, for sure. - If you wanna go out
and hang out with your friends, maybe don't do big jobs.
But hey, we made it through, we're almost to the other side,
we'll be out there makin' friends very soon.
- Yeah, we're gonna be out there making friends.
(hiphop music)
- [James] So for the test we did the same 60 to zero test
from the last episode to see if there's any improvement
in stopping distance.
- Ah, the brakes feel really good,
I'm super impressed with how they work.
I mean, who knew it only took some more aggressive pads
and a little better rotors, man?
- [James] The main advantage of upgrading your brakes
is not a shorter stopping distance.
The main advantage is resisting brake fade.
Brake fade is when your brakes get so hot
that they become less effective or even fail completely.
- These brakes are definitely gonna fade quicker than those.
- So their brakes literally cost 10 times more,
but I don't think they're gonna perform 10 times better.
- [James] So we ran the 60 to zero test
over and over and over to put as much heat and stress
on our new brakes to see how they affected
the stopping distance of each car.
(hiphop music)
- [Man] Oh, you guys--
(laughs)
Oh, you got him, you got him, you got him, you got him.
- They definitely faded but I don't know,
these are the worst circumstances you can throw at brakes
and they were pretty damn consistent.
So for what we paid, yeah, you can't really be
disappointed. - Yeah, can't be
mad about these.
- Look at Nolan's.
First.
Second.
Third.
Fourth.
Fifth is down here.
And then it got kinda consistent I guess after awhile
and well you saw what happened on the last one.
- So with our 60 to zero test we were able to shave off
about five feet from the stock brakes.
Which only goes to show that upgrading your brakes
doesn't really make you stop sooner.
- Which is why we also did an endurance test.
- One marker, pretty consistently after about five laps,
and then on the sixth lap Aaron stood on the brake
and we stopped like 10 feet past, we're like, oh,
it's about to happen.
And then a couple laps later we caught on fire.
So when they go, they go.
We had to replace the pads after that torture test
'cause we completely dusted 'em.
- High car did not catch on fire.
- Nope. - The brakes barely
faded at all.
- All right, so does more expensive mean more better, James?
- Absolutely!
In this case 1,000%!
- So yeah, obviously the Wilwoods are better.
- Way better.
- Way better, I mean--
- I wanna acknowledge the aesthetic gains
from those big brakes.
We had some really cool wheels on the high car,
but seeing those big old beefy boys behind it,
it's like, oh man, that dude knows what's up.
One negative about the Big Brake Kit is you can't do it
and keep your stock wheels.
It's just one more thing to consider.
So Nolan, which brake kit would you buy?
- The Wilwoods are too expensive.
They're so, so good, but that's too much money.
Honestly, just the rotors, pads, and the steel braided lines
on my car made a big difference
and I don't feel bad about saying
that I wouldn't get the more expensive one.
- If this episode gets 10 million views,
we'll give Nolan a raise
so he can start answering the would you buy it question
a little bit more honestly.
(laughs) - No, this is honestly.
I don't have any money to buy this (beep).
You don't either, so.
- Nolan's like, I wouldn't buy lunch!
- So I would go with the cheaper brake kit,
the low kit, if you will.
- Solid upgrade, solid, solid upgrade.
- The high car is now, right in this episode,
is where the disparity really starts to become apparent.
I mean, they're two different cars now.
- Right now we have way more tire and way more brake
than we do power.
So you can just drive the piss outta that thing
and stay outta trouble.
- And you're fine. - It's so fun
to drive right now.
I can't wait 'til we ruin it with more power.
(laughing)
More power, baby!
In the next episode, we're gonna see what's the difference.
A nice aftermarket LSD, or--
- Or welding your differential together.
- If you haven't seen the first two episodes of this show,
make sure you go watch 'em.
We did wheels and tires and coilovers.
Make sure to tune in every Monday
for the next however many Mondays.
If you like this, send it to your friend.
If you hate it, send it anyway, it doesn't matter.
Follow Donut @donutmedia for all that sweet, sweet BTS
and the dankest memes in the automotive world!
I love you.
- Be nice.
See you next time.
We can't nail this.
- [James] You start, you said be nice.
- All right.
Be nice.
- I love you.
- See you next time.
(funky music)