Good news on the Mov'it front

I just received an email from Mov'it... they can make a brake kit for my Ghibli!


Given that I now have 18" wheels fitted to my Ghibli, Mov'it are proposing to go with a 370mm x 35mm disc on the front with 4 pot calipers, as fitted to this Alfa 156 GTA pictured above. This Alfa actually has 19" wheels fitted, so with my 18" wheels the discs will completely fill the rims!

I enquired about fitting 6 pot calipers, but Mov'it considered this a bit overkill given the weight of the Ghibli... I tend to agree if I crunch the numbers. The original brakes on the Ghibli are already pretty good for street driving. Although I've not been on the track with the car, I can imagine they would fade pretty severely unless racing discs and pads were fitted. However, my main reasons for changing out the brakes are primarily that I need new discs and/or pads anyway (the ones currently fitted are fading badly for some reason), plus, with the new wheels the aesthetics of the small discs do not fit in with the new wheels.

But back to the number crunching, increasing the discs from the stock 300mm to 370mm is already an increase in area of 50 per cent! That in itself will yield terrific performance increases, since there will be more contact area between the pads and the disc (since the new caliper and brake pads are also scaled up in size). Also, a larger disc acts as a bigger heat sink, which means that the brake is a lot less likely to overheat in normal driving conditions. And if the brake does get hot, the larger surface area of the new disc means that it will dissipate heat quicker to the atmosphere, which again means that it should run much cooler than the stock brakes and hence overcome the problem of insufficient cooling with the original set up.

To make things better, Mov'it can also manufacture a rear brake kit for the Ghibli! Not only does this look great (so vane!) but it potentially would further improve the braking dynamics of the car, preventing the back from becoming too light and trying to overtake the front! I'd have to see how the car performed with the front kit (and also save up for a few months, since the rear kit is almost as expensive as the front kit!) before entertaining the idea of fitting a rear upgrade kit... it's very tempting though!