AX brakes vs. Racing brakes..., what setup or both???? Options

[BKLA]

The narrow body AX/race car I purchased last October has Boxster brakes up front and "m" front calipers mounted at the rear. I just ordered Rich Johnson's rear boxster kit for the 914 and will install it before the first AX this season up here... seems like a good idea to have a matched set of brakes that are engineered to work with each other. (I believe that the car is in E mod for the PCA AX, but honestly, I have no idea.) This is all well and good for AX, but places me in all kinds of weird and uncompetative classes in PCA, SCCA and is not legal for histerical classes.

I am not planning to race the car this season, but would like to go thru a few DE days and an SCCA drivers school in order to re-activate a 15 year lapsed license... Next year though, I would like to do a few historicals as well as an SCCA race or two.

Anyway, now I have a good set of "M" fronts, a set of "M" rear (smaller piston size) calipers (rebuilt) and I was thinking...Hmmmm

I could put together a complete set of front struts and rear trailing arms with these brakes and have a legal historical, SCCA and PCA system that I could just bolt on. Of course, I need shocks to match, but I have a set of front struts as well as trailing arms with elephant racing bearings installed - so this seems like a no brainer.

Am I over thinking this? - I'm not out to win, been there done that...I'm out to have a really good time - so running in the other classes in an uncompetative car shouldn't really matter.

Any advise from the peanut gallery?

[jhadler]

Hmm, yet another thread on brakes...

Well, the first thing I would say is RTR. Read the Rules. If you're -really- only in it for the fun, then it doesn't matter. But how would you feel if you actually took a podium spot in a race, only to get the boot because of an illegality you could have easilly taken care of beforehand. PCA, Vintage, and SCCA can have very different rules depending on the series (W2W vs. AX), so pick the series that you're most interested in, and build to that.

The second this I would say is that in AX, weight is EVERYTHING. Run the smallest, lightest brakes you can. If you're overheating your brakes at an autox, then you've got a problem. If you can't lock up your wheels with stock 914-4 brakes in a narrow body car (even with super sticky tires), then the brakes are in need of work.

Then you've got the track. If you're running smaller race tracks, stock brakes can work just fine. If you're running bigger tracks, with a bigger motor, then maybe you need bigger brakes to handle the higher speed braking maneuvers. But even on smaller tracks, stock brakes with good cooling are pretty darn good.

That being said, do what you feel best doing. Just make sure that you don't overbias the rear and spin the car off the track the first time you really get on the binders.

-Josh2