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Vendor Carbon Ceramic Brake for M3

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RB_PB

Former Vendor
Jul 20, 2015
190
134
SoCal
Affordable ZR1 kit - Ready to ship.
RB CCB BBK (394x36) for Tesla M3/M3P Front - Direct Caliper to Spindle Installation, Use No Adaptors

RB ZR1 kit is designed for a direct mount to M3 spindle, just like original ZR1/Camaro Z28 for the kit integrity w/o using an adaptor.

Want someting "more' better? Check us out on the complete system kits and a compatible rear CCB rotor kit to complement with the front ZR1 kit.
 
CCB braking systems are inherently, insanely expensive.... so ~15k for a complete kit is, relatively speaking, affordable.


Tesla gets $20,000 for the one for the Model S for example:

Porsche, as I recall, gets a similar price for their PCCB upgrade.


They are also inherently, insanely, useless unless you track the absolute living daylights out of the vehicle at VERY high speeds with a LOT of repeated braking... or perhaps spend a lot of time braking from mid-high triple digit speeds repeatedly on the autobahn or something.

And I do mean mid-high triple digit speeds. A LOT of them.

Back when Car and Driver did testing on this, they did more than 35 back-to-back stops from 100 mph on a Porsche 911 with both the insanely expensive PCCB brakes and the regular ones.

Average braking distance at 305 feet remained identical for both sets of brakes (as you'd expect since the tires were the same and neither set of brakes ever faded)


tl;dr- If you don't know if you need carbon ceramic brakes- you don't.

If you DO know you need them, 15k is reasonable (Disclaimer- that's assuming the kit is comparable to OEM quality- I've no idea personally about this particular vendor either way)
 
Eh ... I think there's a lot of confusion over the best usecase of CCBs.

(Disclaimer, it's been years since I put enough track time in to have wished that I could afford CCBs. Now that I can, I can't find time to go play on the track anymore. :( )

Most pure-track users don't use them: Iron's cheaper. No one cares about dust. Replacing the CCB rotors is stupid expensive, and even though rare, there's no real benefit. Iron works, is cheap enough to replace. You were running special pads/fluid anyway so no gain there ... has no real benefit.

Most pure-street drivers won't get any benefit either. Sure, you never have to replace your rotors ever, but it added $20k to the cost of the car to avoid spending $5k once during the ownership period, maybe. Yeah, maybe some slightly reduced brake dust, but ... ... eh? Maybe you get them to show off how rich you are, but otherwise it doesn't seem to make sense to me.

IMHO, they only make sense for rich-people who track their car regularly but not religiously. You can go from "a new set of rotors every year" to "eh ... I'll sell it before they're worn out". You can likely avoid using specialty pads and replacing pads for your track day. You don't destroy your wheels by baking brake dust into them. They are good for people who track a lot, but also street drive and value the ease of doing both without having to jack the car up between the two use cases.

Edit: A friend of mine who meets that third criteria did over 20 track days (HPDEs, A C7-ZR1 IIRC. About 2h of track-time per day. He pushes it really hard usually) and never replaced rotors, and only had to replace pads a very small number of times. He did run hard enough that he got a 2nd pair of wheels for the track-tires, but didn't trailer it to the track. Drove to track, drove around track, drove home. CCBs allowed him to use brake pads that worked well in both cases, and again never had to replace the rotors at all.
 
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IMHO, they only make sense for rich-people who track their car regularly but not religiously. You can go from "a new set of rotors every year" to "eh ... I'll sell it before they're worn out". You can likely avoid using specialty pads and replacing pads for your track day. You don't destroy your wheels by baking brake dust into them. They are good for people who track a lot, but also street drive and value the ease of doing both without having to jack the car up between the two use cases.

Most people who regularly track or race are not using CCBs.
 
From my friends perspective, that degregation was mostly the surface getting a bit rougher and going through pads quicker... Which he didn't view as consequential.

But again: not worth it if you are a racer. Not worth it if you drive on the street.

I'd only suggest considering it if you drive the occasional HPDE (4-5/year), are fast enough you need track pads with normal brakes, and really really value not having to change pads. And have lots of money.

Edit: advice calibrated for sports cars if normal weight. I'm not sure how EV weight would change it
 
From my friends perspective, that degregation was mostly the surface getting a bit rougher and going through pads quicker... Which he didn't view as consequential.

But again: not worth it if you are a racer. Not worth it if you drive on the street.

I'd only suggest considering it if you drive the occasional HPDE (4-5/year), are fast enough you need track pads with normal brakes, and really really value not having to change pads. And have lots of money.
Wrong on the degradation.

During the 2020 992-series Porsche 911 launch in Australia, Wheels magazine spoke to Paul Watson, Porsche Australia's in-country technical representative. When the conversation turned to carbon ceramic brakes, Watson surprised his questioners with the statement that "if you're doing club days we'd always recommend iron discs." This is an unexpected take considering how carbon ceramic rotors have been promoted as an open-secret weapon for track days.

Watson explained that "ceramic discs can degrade if you're hard on the brakes" and that "heat build-up will degrade the carbon fibers in the disc." Rotor wear comes no matter the rotor material, though.

 
Wrong on the degradation.

Those quotes seem consistent w/ my friend's experience (degraded fibers could be expected to fray, which would accelerate brake pad wear). How else does the degradation affect things? For him, they still worked great to stop up until he sold the car, so ... again, it didn't seem material to him.

Re: "people who don't like cleaning their wheels" ... Porsche has a different product for that these days? PSCB brakes, where they coat the rotors in tungsten carbide. Cheaper than CCBs, have the same brake-dust benefit, and should be much much cheaper to replace/service/etc. I'm not aware of anyone offering similar products for the aftermarket though...
 
There have been many iterations of ceramic discs over the years. Porsche's early PCCBs were very prone to failure, but their 2nd gen rotors were much better. Usually, when we see ceramic rotor issues it is the result of improper pad selection.
 
The one factor you guys are not taking into consideration is CCR's weigh roughly 10lbs each so that unsprung rotational weight savings of give or take 40lbs which is like sheading give or take 120-160lbs of sprung weight. That's no laughing amount of weight savings.