If you have a jacked up off-road rig sporting huge wheels and tires or maybe a lowered truck running huge 24 inch rims, you have undoubtedly noticed the decreased performance afforded by your stock brakes. Upgrading the stock brakes to a set of six piston calipers and larger vented discs by Wilwood performance is probably the best thing you could do to optimize your vehicles braking power, but it's not always possible to pry open your wallet as far as would be needed to dish out the dough for those incredible brakes. Other alternatives in the disc brake upgrade arena are Statix, Stainless Steel and Baer. The replacement brake systems are ideal and they look and perfom great but the downside is that a full brake replacement kit can be very costly.

So what alternatives do you have if you can't drop a couple thousand dollars on a big brake upgrade? Great question, we'll give you the run down on these products and explain why these upgrades will help your truck slow down faster.

New Disks and Pads

A couple vendors are available that offer upgraded rotors and performance pads for your existing brake system however Applied Rotor Technology (ART) is one of the vendors who offers something a little special. ART offers a cryogenically frozen and gas port slotted rotors and performance pads. What the heck does cryogenically treating the rotors do for performance? Well in laymen terms, for this application, cryogenics is the act of freezing metal parts to make them stronger. By cryo-treating a metal part, the molecular structure is made more uniform, more durable and much stronger. Cryogenic tempering changes the areas of weaker, potentially brittle deposits called "austenites" into harder, more uniform particles called "martensites". The end results are brake rotors with unsurpassed life, extended pad wear, decrease in stopping distance, and eliminates dreadful brake fade and rotor warp.

Why is using a set of cryo-treated discs better than running just performance pads? Well, performance pads are great but they get considerably hotter than your standard pads and as a result, without the heat dissipation of the rotors your are looking at better performing brakes even though the life of the pad has been dramatically decreased.