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Key to Enduro Victory

Key to Enduro Victory

Team Sahlen competes in Long Endurance Races. These are not your ordinary 90 minute enduros. No,were talking long, long races, 9 to 14 hours long,...
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Winning Tech for Dodge Viper Cup

Winning Tech for Dodge Viper Cup

Another Dodge Viper Cup win for us! Thanks for the heat shields! The brakes were working overtime with 100 lbs of rewards weight on the car (and also...
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Track Wisdom

"Fluid fade... happens when the temperature of the caliper cylinder (or the piston) reaches the boiling point of the brake fluid and tiny bubbles of compressible gas form in and are diffused through the previously incompressible brake fluid. The pedal then goes to the floor, giving rise to frantic pumping of both the brake pedal and the driver's heart[...] Basically, if the pedal goes all soft and horrible you [...] have boiled the brake fluid. The only cure is to either upgrade the fluid or keep it cooler. This can be achieved either by increasing the cooling to the caliper or by insulating the caliper pistons."

-- Carroll Smith, Engineer to Win

What benefit do these provide once the calipers are heat soaked?

Heat naturally transfers from hot zones into cooler zones, and will seek the easiest path to do so (i.e. the path that transmits the heat the most readily). The main benefit of our titanium heat shields is that they provide more resistance to the transfer of heat from the brake pad to the caliper piston, compared to the standard steel, iron and aluminum components used in brake assemblies. However even with this additional resistance to heat it is possible for the entire system to become heat soaked, to the point where the caliper piston temps are the same as the brake pad backing plate. The heat shields can buy you some time (seconds in a corner, or laps in a session) before this occurs.

Once the brake system reaches saturation point, the heat shields will not be able to help much, as there is no longer a "thermal gradient" of heat traveling from the pad to the piston, and hence no heat flow gradient to block. However when the brakes are released and the cooling starts the properties of the titanium will help again. Our titanium alloy does not retain heat readily, and cools faster than steel. This means that the heat shield will go back to having a lower temperature faster than the brake pad backing plate does, and commence to preventing additional heat flow into the piston.

Our titanium heat shields can also provide benefits even when the car is stopped off track. Heat can flow from the brake pad into the depressed caliper pistons during a pit stop, and result in boiling of the brake fluid making for a nasty surprise at the first corner out of the pits. Our heat shields will help to prevent that scenario, although they cannot eliminate the concern completely.