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Originally Posted by sperry
I'm not at the limits of my tires, which is why I don't need a huge brake kit yet. I just want a stiffer pedal, primarily to allow me to brake harder and still have proper pedal alignment for heel-toe.
Now, if I were able to lock all 4 tires at the same time (or the fronts just slightly before the rears) during straight line braking from high speed, then I'd say that I'm "at the braking limits of the tires". At that point, my bias is just right, so I am using all my available traction to slow the car. And if the pedal feel is such that I'm comfortable and modulation is predictable allowing me to brake just above the locking threshold, and if the brakes don't fade, then I'd say that my brakes couldn't be improved.
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Ha, you have fallen into my trap... It was kind of a trick question to get you to think about it.
If all 4 wheels lock, you are at the limits of the brakes, not the tires necesarily. This is where people get confused. If instead of locking, the brakes continued to apply even greater decelerating force without locking the pad to rotor contact, you would not actualy reach the limits of the tires until the tires started to substantially slip while still rotating. Unfortunately, this is often closely followed by brake lockup because the reduced torque from the tire/road loss of friction shifts the balance and the pad/rotor interface locks.
I'm not saying any particular brake system is not capabe of reaching the limits of a given tire prior to locking, only to change focus from the brakes to the tires and get you to think about how limitations in the brake system could be percieved as using all the tire's traction when it may not be. The equations for all of this are way out of my league.
Perhaps an example would help. Pretend you had a set of infinitely strong cross drilled rotors and the calipers have infinitely hard pins instead of pads connected to the pots. These binary brakes would be on or off, applying either zero or infinite friction instantly to the "pad"/rotor interface causing it to clock, this locking of the brake system is what I mean by a failure which prevents the tire from rolling causing the loss of traction at the tire/road interface.
This is why pad materials are so critical and why spreading force over an area instead of a point allows a brake system to apply braking force while still allowing rotation.