maybe it's better not to be the best, cause then you can lose and it's okay

after the autobahn event, i was a bit surprised at how well the stock brakes performed compared to last season. it made me reconsider the purchase of the stoptech kit (i ordered them in february), but i figured the difference from last season was probably just because autobahn was a lot shorter than gingerman and blackhawk so i wasn't braking as hard.

i wanted to play with the car on friday but dave made me go to niu for someone's birthday party so we drove to dekalb for some bar hopping. i'm glad i never went to college...

so yesterday i worked on the car (with a headache). i was still a bit worried that the wheels wouldn't clear the calipers since the fitment chart wasn't exact. but they did (barely) fit, and all was well with the world. all 14" of rotor and however big the calipers are...

i bled the system with the two bottles of motul 600 i had left over from the stoptechs on my a4, but when i went out to bed the pads in, i had absolutely no pedal. it just sank to the floor and did nothing. after pumping the pedal about 4 times, it would build up pressure and actually stop, but then quickly fade away again a few seconds later. it's a bit scary driving with no brakes.

since i was out of fluid, i couldn't bleed them again, so i called it a night and continued this morning.

sma drove me to autozone and i picked up some valvoline brake fluid so i could bleed the system just to get the brake pedal back. a full bleed while pumping the brake pedal about 5 times between doing each wheel did the trick and the pedal felt solid, so i was off to the races to bed-in the rotors and pads.

i started down 176 but could only get in about four 60-to-10 stops before the car behind me caught up. probably looked weird to see a car repeatedly accelerating as fast as it can, slamming on the brakes to a near stop, and doing it over and over while smoke is bellowing out of the wheels.

i turned down haligus road to continue the bed-in and the first thing i noticed was that i was constantly overbraking the tires. but for some reason the abs wouldn't kick in, so the wheels were stopping almost instantly while the tires skid a bit biting to stop the car. eventually it smoothed out and now it stops right quick.

i need to pick up some more motul 600 this week and flush out the valvoline stuff. heaven forbid i run fluid with a boiling point of only 500 degrees!

as i was driving around on this pleasant day, an older guy in a c5 corvette convertible with what looked to be his wife in the passenger seat pulled up next to me and tried to impress me with the raw power of his fine american automobile. he paced me and then floored it a few times but i just laughed a bit and let him keep showing off. i eventually pulled up behind him at a stoplight and then irony struck as a big pickup truck pulled up in the lane to the right of him at the light.

the truck was carrying a bed full of loose hay and there was a brisk wind blowing to the left. i couldn't stop laughing as i watched countless pieces of hay blow off the truck bed into the convertible corvette, all over the guy and his wife. i'm pretty sure the wife was yelling something at the guy while covering her hair, but i couldn't hear it over my laughter.