Our Team Dynamics 17-inch wheels are big enough to swallow bigger Brembo calipers.
To hold the big rotor in place, we needed a spacer. Our lug nuts just weren't deep enough to choke down enough lug stud. We slipped our old StopTech rotors on there, backwards, to hold it in place while we installed the caliper.
We love our little home-made brake bleeder. There's no check valve, but it still works great. We put some steel connecting rod caps in the bottom of it to keep the cup from tipping over.
The whole Brembo setup might be heavier, but they do look damn good.
We’ve had these Brembo calipers sitting around for some time. After our first track test day at The FIRM, we traded the car’s original 16-inch wheels for a set of front Brembo calipers off of one of their STIs.
Unfortunately, the rotors they gave us were from a later STI, so while the calipers bolted up, the rotors had a different hole pattern than our 5x100mm hubs. We ordered a pair of rotors for a 2004 STI from RockAuto. The price came out to about $90.
Why not rears? Price. To install the Brembo rears and still have a functional parking brake, we’d need different rotors in addition to the calipers. We’re not ready to shell out a thousand bucks to upgrade the rear brakes, so we’ll correct any problems with brake bias either by changing brake pad compounds or installing a proportioning valve.
The Brembo calipers are about 12 pounds themselves—about 2 pounds lighter than the stock Subaru calipers—but there’s quite a bit extra mass in the rotors. Total weight gain is 5 pounds per corner: The Brembo caliper and bigger rotor combined are 31 pounds. Until we decide to buy two-piece rotors, that’s the way it’ll stay.
This WRX is now a real global melting pot. British wheels, Italian brakes, American tires, Dutch dampers, Australian anti-roll bars and some miscellaneous Chinese parts on a Japanese car driven by a half-Brazilian man and his wife, who’s part Jewish and has a Greek name.
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The best bang for your buck on the rear rotors is to get the legacy rear rotors and caliper brackets while re-using the OEM calipers. Look it up on the forums. Other than a little dust shield trimming it is plug and play. There are no trade offs other than the obvious unsprung weight increase.
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