AR Engineering Viper brakes

[Silver R/T]

Anyone have these brakes or knows anyone who got them on their Charger or B-body. Do you think its overkill for street car?
http://www.arengineering.com/caliper/viper2/viper_ab13.html

[golden73]

Don't you know that there is no such thing as overkill!?! 

[Troy]

Yes, they are severe overkill - just ask Andy (the guy who makes them). The smaller kit that he has is much cheaper, uses more readily available stock parts, and still fits within a 15" wheel. The 13" brakes require 17" or larger Mustang wheels - or at least wheels with the same offset and backspacing as a Mustang. Advantages of the newer style Viper calipers is that they are cheaper if buying new and they are a better design. Those are really cool kits but if your car never sees any track time (road course) then it's a lot of money wasted. Of course, they'll be fine on the street if you really feel the need to own them.

Troy

[andyf]

I guess it just depends on how you drive the car.  If you swing by a dealership and look at any new car that has more than 300 hp you'll see some pretty serious brakes.  The new SR8 has 14 x 1.250 rotors with big Brembo 4 piston calipers.  So the engineers in Detroit are hanging big brakes on the new cars for a reason.  It could be just pretty parts for marketing purposes but I kind of doubt it.

If you read mags like Car and Driver you'll see that even with the big 13 x 1.250 stuff on new cars the drivers still complain about fade when driving hard on a road course.  A 4000 lb car with 400+ hp will smoke brakes pretty quickly on a road course.

We use an A body car for brake testing at Portland International.  That car has a fairly typical iron head SB in it (no exotic w8 heads or anything like that) and it will turn the Viper rotors blue after 30 minutes of road racing.  It will absolutely shred a 11.75 brake system after hard laps and that is just a small block A body car.

But of course, with normal street driving you can get by on much smaller rotors than the 13 inch kit.  I have the 13 inch kit on my car and I've driven it for several years with basically zero measured wear.  The brakes are so big that I could probably get 75,000 miles on a set of pads.  So yeah, it is overkill from that standpoint.

The other aspect is looks.  If you're going to put 17 inch rims on a car then you probably want some 13 inch rotors to fill up the space other wise it looks a little funny.  I know that there is a strong backlash within the Mopar hobby about "big" wheels.  I've talked to plenty of Mopar guys who refuse to accept anything other than 14 inch wheels on their car.  I don't take it personally, I just prefer bigger rims, bigger brakes and modern tires on my car. 

[andyf]

Here is the latest kit that I'm playing around with.  These are 14 x 1.250 rotors from a 2006 Charger.  This whole kit will bolt onto any B body but you'll need to run 18 inch rims.

[Mike DC]

Big brakes are a great thing to have, but I think the OEMs are doing it to outdo eachother and impress the magazine writers. 

For anyone who doesn't run a car at the track, big brakes are overkill on a street car.And the factories aren't exactly into building anything "overkilled."  Mopar still builds cars with cheap wiring that dims the headlights and they build trucks with balljoints that can rip the wheels off.  So I really doubt they're gonna equip assembly-line passenger cars with huge autocross-quality brakes for any reason that won't directly impress the average buyer.