Today at Atelier Kaz - ex-Honda R&D, F1, Indy/CART engineer

I receive lots of email regarding NSX every day and quite often, the owners are asking similar question.
Instead of trying to find my previous answer to other owners and cutting & pasting them to create new reply, I will just post them on here so that I can refer it in the future.

Q: Without replacing the OEM 15/16 wheels, what can I do to improve the brake performance?

A: If we start discussing about the brake without understanding your current issue and the final goal, it would take weeks so the most important thing is to understand the above two points – the issue and your goal.

Unfortunately, brake is not that simple.
You could improve the performance by not even changing any parts but instead, by just changing the way you apply the brake.

Lots of people just change the brake pad/disc to higher friction material without looking at the brake balance, chassis setup, tyre, tyre pressure, etc.

Before I go too far, could you let me know on the following points?

What is the problem at the moment?

Are you triggering the ABS under braking or are you using ABS on purposely on braking into the corner? Are you using the classic ABS or have you upgraded it to the later spec?

What kind of tyre and suspension setup are you using?

What is the speed range you are talking about?
Can you lock the wheel from that speed range with your existing setup?

Have you ever took any driving skill course or being as a passenger in high performance car being driven by the professional driver who earns his living through this?


I think this would be enough to start with.


[After getting the reply from the owners, all of them stated that they are mainly using their NSX for street driving purpose and none track day or just a few track sessions per annum. Also, the goal is for one’s enjoyment driving for pleasure and not for competition.]



A: I used to test drive many different cars for certain organisation and tracked every 2 weeks or every week somewhere in the world using special cars (only 4 available in the world) with nearly 600HP or over 300HP (depending on the spec) and based on this, for street driving purpose, NSX OEM setup is more than enough for braking performance.
If it doesn’t work for you, you either have brake issue, not using the brake efficiently or not making it work for you.

You can’t do anything above the performance of the tyre so if you lock the wheels and trigger the ABS, then for most of the drivers, that will be the initial limit.
You could change this limit by shifting the weight on purposely by opening/closing the TH as well as applying/releasing the brake pedal but that’s not something you would do on public road.

It could mislead you so I don't like using the following wording but in much exaggerated expression, if you can lock the wheels from 70mph, you have enough stopping power for the street driving purpose.
Once you get used to it, then you want to increase the deceleration rate by increasing the capacity of the brake system and the chassis setup but that’s the next stage.

If you are using the early model smaller brake calliper on 15/16 inch OEM wheel with reasonably well known tyres and classic ABS using OEM suspension with standard weight distribution, the limiting factor is the brake balance.

The early model had brake balance too much towards the front that no matter what you do, you can easily lock the front wheel and then the slow reacting ABS kicks in and making the situation even worse.
By the time you lock the front wheel, your weight is shifted towards the front too much that your rear end is not working efficiently for stopping the car.
This is why you feel as if your body is thrown to the front when you apply hard braking on the early model NSX.

This is the reason why Honda shifted the brake balance massively towards the rear on the later model (97+).
The ABS setting was also changed at the same time and it was improved further from 00+ models when the Bosch style one body ABS was introduced.
With this setup, when you apply hard braking, your body feels as if being squashed into the ground and this is the proof that all four tyres are working much harder in stopping the car than the early models.

The latest ABS setting is like night and day difference compared to the classic ones and thus, much faster and smoother control.
For the first time, I managed to on purposely use ABS on NSX while driving into the corner.
With the classic ABS, it just caused too much understeer or even dangerous situation as the reaction speed was so slow and the high pressure accumulator already lost the pressure that suddenly, the driver would feel changes in brake pedal feeling with no more ABS and this would happen while braking. Scary….


Ultimately, if you want to stick with the OEM parts, you would want the later spec brake calliper/larger disc + latest ABS but this will require at least OEM 16 inch at the front wheel.


I presume your wheel setup is 15/16 so the only option is to either change the way you apply the brake or try different combination of the brake pad.
This is presuming that you have already overhauled the brake calliper and confirmed that none of the pistons, slider pins, etc have problem and none of the pads are stuck inside the carrier bracket.

You also need decent tyres.

Rock solid brake pedal feeling means nothing for the above case because it will be rock solid if the piston, calliper or the pad couldn’t move freely.

Attending the driving skill course is the most cost effective way for learning how to apply brake.

You don’t change just one parts without considering the other factors but for street driving purpose only, you could try just replacing the pad to the aftermarket one and keep other setup.
Please note that you already have massively biased brake balance towards the front with slow to react classic ABS so you need to be very careful on selection of the pad.

If you just use the same aftermarket pad material for the front and rear, it will shift the brake balance towards the front even further.
OEM uses different material between the front and the rear although they may look the same.

Please note that on street driving, normally you will be applying very gentle braking and thus, there will be no pad material coating left on the disc. This is not a problem for street driving using ordinary pad and disc material but does become a problem when doing aggressive driving as you won’t get max performance immediately until you can get enough pad material coated on the disc.
This is why on the preparation for the track session using production cars, we normally apply multiple braking to transfer pad material to the disc.

So, in summary, please check the state of your internal brake calliper/bracket/pad status.

Attend driving skill course and try aftermarket brake pad if you want to stay with 15/16 wheels (which is very nice on track) but you may need trying different combination between front and rear.
Having said this, you could live with the same material for front and rear set for street driving session and depending on the way you drive.

Please enjoy driving your NSX regularly to know your car better.


Kaz