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June 2003: Brake Discs

Ah brakes - well where to start (or stop) even.

The tiger has always suffered in the braking department - probably due to the fact that the car is fitted with the original floor mounted pedals. However last year it started really suffering with the brakes becoming a press pedal and hope situation, this was found when driving on a sprint course as I couldn't really push the car without the nagging fear that it wasn't going to stop!

At the Tiger open day in September '02 I left the car with Tiger to have a look at the brakes, they reworked the pedal linkage and deglazed the discs which had been turning a nice shade of green (from the EBC green stuff pads) and for about six months they were fine, recently they have been going off again so something had to be done.

The Solution

I was speaking to a couple of fellow nutters (tiger owners) who commented that groved discs prevented the glazing from forming in the first place by removing the gases generated by braking, so this seemed to be the answer replace the discs for better performance.

The next step was to choose the brand of discs - until recently I had thought that red-dot seemed to be a good brand but their introduction of personalised discs where you can have a name engraved into the disc was a step too far for me! So instead I rang Tarox and spoke to a very helpful person who said yes we make discs for a standard Sierra, you can have either the base for £65+vat, the mid range for £132+vat, or the top range for £137+vat with free delivery! Well I thought for a bit and would normally have gone for the mid range but with only another £5 to pay plumped for the top of the range G88 discs.

Most of you reading this will know full well how to change discs so I won't go into detail, instead I'll just leave you looking at the pictures below.

Old brake disc on car Two discs, I wonder which is the new one? New disc fitted to axle Refitted and ready to go

The discs have now been fitted to the car and it has done about 200 miles since - so as yet I have not been doing any heavy braking to avoid over stressing the new discs - however in the next couple of weeks it is going on a sprint day so we will see how it performs then!