After months of working on our older cars, we decided it was time to finally dive into one of our newer project cars; after all, it couldn't possibly be a bigger headache, right? Wrong. Being threatened by multiple Audi owners wasn't fun at all, and it made us start turning wrenches again on our beloved but problematic S4. Yes, this car is fast, and we do plan on making it even faster, but to do that and feel safe, we needed some brakes. To be quite honest, we couldn't continue to drive the car how it was without replacing the factory stoppers. Let us explain.
If you aren't suffering from ADD or any other type of issue that may affect your short-term memory, you'll recall that we recently went out to Buttonwillow Raceway to have fun with some of our project cars. Well, what originally started out as a relaxing weekend ended in a pocketbook-draining exercise for all our project cars. The Mk II Jetta developed some issues with the front end (which we cured last month), and to top it off, our Project S4 ate through its brakes.
When we say ate through them, we don't mean wore out the pads, we mean completely junked them. So we were faced with a dilemma: Do we suck it up and put on a set of stock OEM replacement brakes or do we call Brembo and order its four-wheel Gran Turismo brake kit? It took us about 30 seconds to decide, and 25 of those seconds were spent trying to remember what we were thinking about originally.
Our best guess about why the brakes went bad is simple. The car is heavy, more than 3,700 pounds. Combine that weight with triple-digit speeds, a whole lot of hard braking, and Buttonwillow Raceway, and you'll end up with a big pile of decimated brake parts. The rear brakes actually took the hardest hit. To be fair, we did run the car on the track for two days straight. We knew the factory brakes weren't designed for the track, but we never thought they would take such a hit. The car actually had to be garaged after the event for damn near a month because it was unsafe to drive.
After scrounging up the ducats to order the brakes, we figured we should get some shiny wheels for it, too, and finally kill the sleeper look the car had going. We didn't want to put too big of a wheel on it because the car does get driven at the track, so we needed something we could put meaty tires on. We ordered up a set of the OZ Superleggera modular three-piece wheels in 18x8.5 from Shoreline Motoring in Huntington Beach, California, making sure to have the wheels built with the proper offset and backspacing to fit the giant Brembo brakes.
We decided to go with BFGoodrich G-Force KDWs on the car again because we were impressed with them at the track, except this time we got them in 225/40R18. Once the wheels and tires arrived, Paul from Shoreline gave us a call to tell us how jealous he was of the wheels. We grabbed the Brembo brakes, threw them in the trunk of the S4, and headed down to Shoreline to get the brakes installed and the wheels thrown on. But, alas, things can never be that easy.
Twenty miles into our trip the S4 decided it was tired of being abused, so in protest it broke down on the side of the road. The car managed to fuse one of the rear brake pads to the rotor and immediately locked the back wheel up. Thanks to Los Angeles traffic, it happened at a very slow speed. Shortly after that happened, the car made a really loud noise and ejected one of the brake pads from the caliper.
To top it off, the piston came out of the rear caliper and wedged itself between the rotor and the caliper. At this point, we were spraying brake fluid all over the street. So, on what we think was the last bit of pedal before there were to be no brakes at all, we pulled into a gas station and called a tow truck. $210 and 35 miles later we were at Shoreline Motoring--which reminds us, we really need to start a tow company so we can cash in on that money tree.
Once we were at Shoreline Motoring, we got to take a good look at the damage. We included some pictures because, as we all know, it's always fun to laugh at other people's misfortune. The Brembo brakes came out of the box and went onto the car almost that easily. Believe it or not, the stock brakes take longer to take off then it takes to put the Brembos on. The kit came with a complete set of instructions and every bit of hardware needed to install it. A few hours and a couple stops to Shoreline Motoring's Starbucks coffee station and the wheels and brakes were on and ready to go.
Everyone in the shop wanted a turn to drive it, so the keys got passed around a few times until everyone had their fill. The brakes are absolutely amazing; there is no other way to describe them. They are such an improvement over stock that it isn't fair for Audi to compare them with the stock brakes.
The Brembo setup has a gradual bite in, provided you don't use too much pressure, thus they feel like a stock brake around town. Once you start using some serious pressure on the pedal, though, it becomes a different monster altogether.
Thanks to the Goodrich steel braided brake lines, the pedal has a precise feel, and it's no longer spongy. The 14-inch front rotors fill the 18-inch wheels and grab the overweight beast and bring it to a stop insanely quick; this car should never have any problems late breaking people into corners on the track. Fade is a word that doesn't exist in Project S4's vocabulary anymore.
The OZ wheels took away our sleeper look and added just the right amount of bling and class to the car. The three-piece wheels are very light, and they look great on the car, if we do say so ourselves. So now we figure it's time to start looking into some turbo upgrade stuff for this car to get the Project S4 to be a freeway flyer, then after that we'll probably hunt down a Corvette or two just for the hell of it.