Nissan 370Z Forum - View Single Post

prandelia · 09-07-2022, 04:28 PM

Somebody asked me to post about my brake/cooling setup, so here goes.

I used the Stillen kit, but instead of cutting holes in my bumper (was never going to happen), we simply routed the hose to just below undertray, right behind and slight aft the wheel/tire, with a hard flexible mount so that it holds up to any bumps, scrapes, or off-track excursions. This inlet allows for cool fresh air. I can say, it has held up perfectly fine in all those situations, and has shown virtually no contact with anything since it's right by the wheel/tire, as it gains ground clearance nicely with any wheel movement.

Also, I have used $25 Porsche GT3 front ducts (I used them on all my track cars), as a very real and function method to increasing air-flow into the caliper and rotor areas. Both the OE and the new Z1 undertray have areas that allow air to flow directly onto the curved GT3 duct. The picture shown has the wheel turned all the way out, for better viewing, but when it's straight ahead, the duct is right behind the rotor/caliper dumping air there as well.

Finally, here's a pic of the most obvious design flaw of the Z1 rotors, compared to the Paragon race rings. The front/outer face of the rotor/hat assembly is open, meaning, any cooling that you vent into the rotor from a cooling duct, is not efficient and is turbulent. True race rotors have a solid outer face so that the air ducted INTO the cooling vanes from the back-side stay in the vanes and vent all the way through cooling the rotor. Z1's effort to "reduce" weight is on of the reasons they warp so easily, along with perhaps a lower quality metalurgy. It seems a high quality 2 piece setup isn't very common for these cars, and I wasn't sure that many people know about these guys. They will make 48-vane and 72-vane endurance rings for our cars. Until AP offers a CP5XXX kit that I don't have to cobble together from parts all over the world, I'm making the OE calipers work.

These two cooling brake mods, along with Endless RF-650 fluid, and Paragon's true floating 2-piece race brake setup offers fade free performance all session, all day. Been very happy with it. Most importantly, no hacking up my front bumper. Hope this helps for anybody with my same considerations.