[lunarhighway]

well i'm not saying one has to do with the other, but

i had smooth wheel hubs installed from my dads retired ascona (nephew of the old chevrolet cavelier), wich look more or less like a moondisc but with vent holes at the sides, i also had an airdam extention in font of the wheels, the wheelwels had no liners in front of the tires (stock setup) so behind the bumper everything was pretty much a see trough affair...wich would not make speciffic break cooling paths needed, but might also cause hot engine air to migrate to the wheelwels.

it happened on a trip to the ardenes in my old kadett, we where going to say in a guesthouse at a farm for a weekend with some friends, it was a couple of hours driveing highway, and than some large open roads but more hills, mostely high speed driveing so i think the brakes would have been rather hot to begin with.


suddenly the GPS send me on a little road wich i though would be a shortcut to another major road but the quality of the road continued to decrease, wich got me a little agitated as i was beginning to suspect the GPS from not sending me along the best route (it turned out other people's gps from a different brand had indeed taken a better route). my girlfriend started jokeing about running a flat etc, wich didn't really help to improve my mood at the time, anyway.

suddenly there appeared a very big pothole in the road, so a slamed the breaks however with all the small rocks on the roads i skid trough it.

i feared the worsed but when i got out of the car everything seemed fine, however when we got on our way i noticed a vibration in the steering wheel everytime i used the breaks.

this vibration didn't go away, so when i got home i took of the wheel and noticed the contours of the breakpad where visible on part of the disc, i don't think the disc itself was really warped but you can tell that from just looking at it... it appeared some break pad substance was baked onto the disc.

my dad said it wouldn't be a huge problem and since i switched to another car shortly afterwards i didn't fix it, but if the discs where indeed damaged that would have been an expensive repair.

anyway.... it's one of these things that remembers you that various components on a car can get hot and that they can get damaged pretty easy under such conditions.

perhaps the mods to the car had nothing to do with it but that would only mean that these things could occur even faster when factory cooling would be decreased...

since then i try to see why engineers made a setup wich seems to be causeing drag... rather than assume everthing that sticks out into the airflow is just a design flaw... you might not be able to tell a break cooling path from all the other mess on the bottom of the car, untill you close it and the breaks overheat... wich doesn't mean things can't be improved