Well, some time ago I started to think about a way of upgrading the rear brakes on the Coupe without having to go to the expense of the Tarox kit (approx. £500
!). The idea was to use a replacement caliper that would accommodate a slightly larger (257mm) vented disc for better cooling and general stopping power. JohnS kindly lent me a set of calipers from a Skoda vRS that were designed to work with a 22mm thick disc and had the same mounting arrangements as the standard Coupe item. Today, I finally
found the time to offer them up and see what will need to be modified to fit them
.
Before I started, I must confess that I had some concerns, as the vRS caliper has a totally different offset on the slider that the Coupe one (see
Photo 1 ). This meant that I was going to have problems with the offset of the disc (although not impossible to fix). Unfortunately, the next stage identified a much bigger problem, the vRS slider is a lot thicker than the standard, meaning that there is no way that it will fit onto the hub barrier (see
Photo 2 ,
Photo 3 , &
Photo 4 ). Bu**er
!
Not to be defeated so easily, I then had a look at the option of removing the vRS slider and went back to the standard Coupe one, which at least bolts onto the hub. Now, I have the later alloy calipers on my car, which have a bar across the front of the slider. This stopped me fitting the caliper properly, but with the older style slider (that have no such bar) it would be possible to fit the larger vRS caliper onto the slider without a problem (see
Photo 5 ). I even put this arrangement onto the car and fitted the wheel to check clearance. No problem, even with the caliper sticking out a little due to the bar, as shown in
Photo 6 )
.
Now, the biggest problem that remains is that it is obviously not possible to use the Coupe slider (designed for 10mm discs) with 22mm ones
! The way I see it, there are two options to solve this:
1) Widen the gap to accommodate a thicker disc in the standard slider.
Pros - Relatively easy to do, and it fits! Punto 16v disc should be available off the shelf to fit with the correct offsets Cons - Not sure that there is enough space on the slider to allow enough meat to be removed and still retain space for the pads 
2) Find a different slider that will fit onto the Coupe hub carrier and also take the vRS caliper.
Pros - Saves hacking a slider up to fit the thicker disc; a better engineering solution.Cons - Finding the perfect slider Other issues that still need sorting include handbrake cable (I have an idea about this
) and flexible brake hose, but I can't really look into these until I have at least fitted the caliper correctly onto the hub, so they will have to wait for a little while. Hopefully Carl is going to help me out by providing a set of the older steel calipers with slider without the bar.
If I manage to resolve these issues, I am hopeful that this will be a much cheaper upgrade than the Tarox kit. The calipers are available second hand, but they are only about £90 new, and the discs are only around £25 for standard ones (upgrade ones should also hopefully be available for a little more, depending upon exactly which one I end up having to buy). I guess they may be a need for a couple of hoses as well, but that should still see it coming in at less than half the price of the Tarox. Obviously, performance gains may not be as great but for track abuse, when brake cooling is actually more important, I think it should be a good improvement
.
I'll keep you posted on further progress, but if anyone has any comments or suggestions, please feel free to chip in
.
Phil
