The brakes have come a long way since 2008/2009, as well, so keep that in mind. I was smoking the stock brakes on the 1125r at Eagles Canyon at my skill level, never mind someone actually fast. Today I'm significantly quicker than in 2009 and yet I find the brakes work great.
The Nissin 2015 fatback pads, finned rotors and especially new mounting hardware all helps tremendously and more or less fixed the Buell brake system at club racing levels. It just took a while to get there. In the XB era, the bikes were basically no faster than an SV650, so the amount of energy the brake system had to dissipate just wasn't that high.
Keep in mind even in the Eslick/DSB era they were already using heavily modified systems compared to stock -- better mounting hardware, milled out calipers for better cooling, and so on. When May was in AMA one of the club guys took close up pictures of the brake on his bike and the rotor mounting hardware was all non-stock. It looked like they had milled the washers and drive bushings from copper -- probably some esoteric BeCu alloy based on the comments from Badweb. The WSBK stuff years later was even more esoteric, and there's pictures of it floating around if you look for them -- pencil milled, prototype one-off calipers, vented rotors, etc. And, it was well documented rotors and mounting hardware were "one use"... meaning one race... at that level.
That Blake guy you see on Badweb was/is a total blowhard that took the defense of the Buell designs, facts or not. Some of the things Buell did were genius. Some of them, like the brake, just put a lot of resources into solving a problem a different way that was already acceptably solved. And, here we are, ~15 years after the introduction of the ZTL with a brake that, more or less, is a functional equal to the existing systems.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by kneepucker
