Brake Rotor Explodes in Super Slo-Mo
A Powerful Reminder to Maintain Your Car, and That Slow-Motion Video Is Amazing.
We’ve all seen those incredible racing photos of brakes glowing red hot as a car comes flying into a corner. Such incredible engineering is a beautiful look at how far we’ve progressed as a species. But what happens if those glowing brakes don’t get a chance to cool down? What would happen if you pushed a rotor to its absolute limit? Well apparently it just explodes into a pile of glowing shrapnel, as a few Finnish folks on YouTube found out in the video below.
The folks at Beyond the Press decided to really stress a set of brakes, so they set up a Ford Fiesta on blocks, locked the brakes on one front wheel, and mashed the throttle until they got a failure. They also filmed the entire thing in slow motion, so you can really see the carnage happen. The video is amazing.
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While it was designed to just show off what can happen, and how much torture a modern set of rotors can take, the video also shows the importance of maintenance. As the rotor gets hotter and hotter, you can see a point on the rotor that is not heating evenly. There is a blatantly-obvious weak point in the disk, probably from uneven wear, and it is here that the disc first shatters. It did take an immense amount of punishment to make this thing fail to start with, but I can’t help but imagine how much longer the rotors would have lasted if they were heating evenly.
So watch this video and gasp in amazement at the mayhem. But then maybe think about the last time the rotors were changed on your car. And then giggle at the guys freaking out because the rotor shrapnel set one of their GoPros on fire.
Via [Jalopnik]
