Last winter at the SCCA Motorsports Expo in Charlotte, I was speaking with a Wilwood brake engineer about my struggle managing temperature gain with MINI Gen 1 JCW brakes.  I told him I use the car mostly for track instruction and the instructor runs are generally 25-30 minutes in duration, though some weekends I might get 40-50 minute runs on Fridays. I have some brake ducting to the wheel well and fairly open 10 spoke 17 inch rims.  He had a couple of interesting recommendations including the use of the radial mounted 4 piston caliper and standard (not drilled/slotted) 12.19 inch rotor.  This setup for MINI, with the Caliper in Black, brake lines, and up-rated BP-20 pads runs about $1,000.

Installation was very straight-forward following the instructions included with the kit.  You do have to experiment with the included shims to get the right spacing, but that was not too complicated.  My car required four shims to get the caliper centered on the disc and one shim to get the pad to the outside edge of the disc without binding. The only real challenges were in removing the old dust shields (which are not reused) and getting the flexline to fit. The flexline passes through a bracket on the chassis and is held in place with clips.  I had to open the hole in the bracket just a bit to get it to fit, but a couple of hits with the Dremel took care of it. (See, yet another project requiring the use of the Dremel.)

I’m using the BP-20 compound pad which is supposed to be excellent for track-oriented street cars.  I’m heading to Summit Point on Friday and will see how it performs.