Are brake pressure gauges a waste of time

Soon I will be installing an all new braking system in the TR8 that includes Wilwood pedals and dual masters. Will installing a set of dual brake pressure gauges be worth the extra time and $100 or so it will take to put them in? I'm thinking being able to visualize and quantify front to rear bias will be helpful in setting proper balance and keeping it there. Or, is it just a matter of adjusting the pedals until its good and forget about it? What happens when you go to a wet setup? Uncharted territory for me here. Can anybody recommend a good balance adjustment cable? Figured it was Wilwood and nothing else until I looked last night and saw multiple manufacturers.

I'd think you'd do the normal bias adjustments without much regard for hard numbers then write it down for future reference if you ever have the system apart again.

I doubt there's a formula you could plug in and set it to due to the amazing amount of braking variables such as tire grip, pads material, rotor type etc.

I put them in my first race car build but, you adjust the balance bar pretty much by tire and road conditions - and setup come from clicks +/- your "comfy baseline". So, analog gauges are pretty useless IMO. At least in the way I tended to set things. Which was... fly into corner, trail brake. Adjust until rear of car behaves like I like. I do not think this is the same procedure Penske uses. YMMV.

A pair of transducers in the line along with a pedal pressure sensor to log the data would be neat for comparison strictly as a geek-out to see bias and pedal pressures over time next to other lap data. Not that you would ever look at it more than once for fun... but neat.

Huckleberry wrote: I put them in my first race car build but, you adjust the balance bar pretty much by tire and road conditions - and setup come from clicks +/- your "comfy baseline". So, analog gauges are pretty useless IMO. At least in the way I tended to set things. Which was... fly into corner, trail brake. Adjust until rear of car behaves like I like. I do not think this is the same procedure Penske uses. YMMV. A pair of transducers in the line along with a pedal pressure sensor to log the data would be neat for comparison strictly as a geek-out to see bias and pedal pressures over time next to other lap data. Not that you would ever look at it more than once for fun... but neat.

Them sensors result in conversations like this:

Driver: I was flat through that section.

Engineer: No you were not.

"Proper bias" changes a bit with weather and type of tires etc. Once you have adjustable bias pedal set up you tune by your ass not by the gauges. Yes they look cool but there a pain to bleed too. there always end up the highest point... Skip them, buy two that screw in to your bleeders holes then count number of turns from full one way then full the other way center step on the pedal and count turns to your starting point. wright this on the dash by the adjuster. then replace the bleeders. bleed one more time and go have fun.

If you're talking about front to rear bias it would be pretty useless because the different piston diameters, pad areas, rotor diameter, etc etc etc means that the two ends of the car are going to require different hydraulic pressure to get the same braking anyway. So unless you were going to work off of someone elses pressure numbers who was using a mostly identical setup, the actual numbers wouldn't let you do anything but track your changes. And as mentioned, you could more or less do that with a pointer on the knobs anyway.

We also had them in one car. They served no purpose other than to add weight and more pieces to go wrong which one of them did when a fitting cracked and started to drip about 10 laps into a 200 lap feature.

dean1484 wrote:

Huckleberry wrote: A pair of transducers in the line along with a pedal pressure sensor to log the data would be neat for comparison strictly as a geek-out to see bias and pedal pressures over time next to other lap data. Not that you would ever look at it more than once for fun... but neat.

Them sensors result in conversations like this: Driver: I was flat through that section. Engineer: No you were not.

Well, that's the throttle position sensor, but... :)

I put a brake pressure sensor in my car. What I'm looking for in my datalogs is A) what did the car do, B) what did the driver (me) do to make the car do that, and C) what do I need to do differently in order to improve. Someone who's experienced at reading data logs can probably predict B and C based upon A, but if you want to actually figure it out from scratch and prove it you need the driver inputs, throttle, brake and steering angle. I don't have steering angle in the car yet.

I agree that a live view of the pressures is pretty much useless, so I'd avoid any kind of analog gauge. If you've got a sensor and a programmable digital dash then a digital gauge is free at that point, although still not very useful.