From the February/March issue of Car and Driver.
While everyone’s busy celebrating the complicated sound maker under the hood, a device that needs all sorts of care and feeding and still only makes peak power in a minuscule range, they tend to ignore the system that may be twice as powerful. That’s right, the brakes.
The whoa part of the equation is just as responsible for a quick lap as the go portion, even if its sound doesn’t get people out of their seats. So this year we quantified just how hard braking systems were working at Lightning Lap, calculating the kinetic energy of a vehicle at its peak speed on the front straightaway and how quickly the brakes shed it before Turn 1, expressed in familiar horsepower terms for you engine lovers.
Energy increases with the square of speed, so the relatively light but swift entries, such as the Lamborghini Huracán Tecnica and the Chevrolet Corvette Z06, are way up there. But the heavier and slightly slower Mercedes-AMG SL63 is the highest. By comparison, the Volkswagen Golf GTI, which is 1014 pounds lighter than the SL63 and traveling 26 mph slower, has about half the energy.
When it comes to measuring stopping power, the Huracán and Corvette Z06 are tops, averaging over 1000 horsepower for the 4.6 seconds it takes to erase more than 100 mph. If you’re not immediately impressed, in the case of the Z06, that’s nearly four times quicker than it takes to accelerate between those two speeds. Zooming in on the hardest-working couple of seconds, those cars are decelerating with the power of more than 1600 horses.
If you instead compare average braking power with peak engine power, the highest achievers are the BMW M240i, the Audi RS3, and the Hyundai Elantra N, each with their brakes slightly more than twice as strong as their not-too-shabby engines.
But even the Kia Carnival minivan—in this case already experiencing brake fade—has stopping power 1.3 times that of its engine. This is why a firm application of the brake pedal should remedy any kind of stuck-throttle or unintended-acceleration situation, and also why it’s better to be a little fast at the end of an on-ramp than the opposite; shedding speed is a lot quicker than gaining it.
