Brake Rotors???

[Jibber]

You see them all the time. Rotors. Stock ones, Slotted, Drilled, and Drilled and Slotted combined.

Which ones are the best?

Everytime Car and Driver features a high end sports car I have noticed that almost always they have just the Drilled rotors. If these guys (Porsche, McClaren) put them on their cars they must be the best.

Thoughts???

[ToplessPony94]

Don't know myself, but I've read in quite a few places that drilled or slotted are good, but when you combine them on one rotor you get the worst points of both.

Personally, I like the PowerStop (not PowerSlot) rotors. Everyone assumes I have new rotors but they have been on the car for the past 14 (!) years and don't have a speck of rust anywhere and they stop great. I have the Cobra 13" rotors on my car. Reasonably priced, good performance and appearance.

[Mustang5L5]

What do you consider the "best"??

Short and sweet, plain faced rotors are the "best". More pad surface area for contact, and more rotor mass to help absorb heat and control fade. Yes, brake cooling is more or less dictated by mass of rotor and face surface area, and not the number of holes drilled into it.

With that said, modern supercar brakes are not the same as passenger car brakes. With a huge 13" or 14" rotor, mass is definitely not a problem. They can afford to have crossdrilled rotors because the total rotor mass is still enough to help the brakes absorb heat in hard braking. Also, the primary use of the crossdrilled rotors is for pad offgassing. Some exotic or semi-race pads release gases when heated. The gases need somewhere to go, so the crossdrilled rotors were designed to give these gases an escape path. Modern passenger car brake pads do not offgas..so there is no technical reason to provide cross-drilled holes in a rotor.

Plus, take a 10" or 11" rotor and drill holes into it and not you reduce it's mass a lot. get some heat into the rotor and the heat concentrates in what's left of a rotor and can cause cracking.

Most street cars don't drive too aggressively to have a problem with this, so for most people going about on their sunday drive, run whatever rotors you want. Hell, i have a set of crossdrilled rotors on my car because I rarely get my car into 5th gear so getting my 13" brakes hot and toasty is not a concern to me.

If you plan on being abusive to your brakes, solid rotors are the way to go unless you start running 14" brakes with cooling ducts, race pads in a 2800 pound car. then x-drilled could be fine for you like it is on modern supercars.

Brake metals and processing is another story too...which i could probably write another page on. You actually don't want rotors with "drilled" holes. You want them cast into the rotor instead. Drilling can cause stresses that need to be properly releived. Most of your cheapo drilled rotors don't have these processes applied.

[TorchRedSVT]

Best of the best are ceramic brakes as used on the ZR1, Porsche and ferraris......but you are talking about 10k+ braking systems

general rule of thumb is Drilled OR slotted.......99% of the time when you see a car with both....it's for show purposes.

When it comes time for brakes on my car, I'll be doing the Bear Decela rotors which are cross drilled and slotted.....but I admit, it's mostly for the looks.

Are you looking for something specific?

[yuke175]

I have the decelarotors too