Will big brakes make our ’90s MR2 perform like a modern machine? | Articles

Your brakes are the most powerful speed-changing devices available. Regardless of how much power you make, even the most mediocre brake system can convert speed into heat quicker than your powerplant can turn fuel into speed.

Upgrading your brakes represents a highly effective way to make your car perform better. The results? Faster laps and more fun.

But brake upgrades don’t always come in neat packages. Sometimes they’re limited by budget or parts availability.

Such was the case with our 1991 Toyota MR2 Turbo. While a highly regarded car, it simply isn’t served by a large selection of “off-the-shelf” upgrades available–whether it’s brakes or most anything else. But our journey to better brakes shows how anyone can identify and then remedy the situation, even when that clear path or deep knowledge base doesn’t really exist. 

So let’s dig in.

To Start, We Can’t Stop

The brakes found on the second-generation MR2–particularly early cars like ours–are, in a word, lousy. Even on the high-performance Turbo models, the original brakes barely measure 10 inches in diameter. Then add single-piston calipers and pads around the size of a saltine cracker.

Before making any changes, we ran our MR2 at the Florida International Rally & Motorsport Park for some baseline laps. And those laps were quite sketchy when it came to braking. Initial application felt vague, and fade appeared almost instantly as awful fluid compressed old pads. 

We could manage an aggressive lap–like, just one–but we really had to pick and choose our braking opportunities since every hard pedal application was essentially a roll of the dice.

We knew we could do better. 

Our MR2’s performance through just one corner shows how much the old brakes were hurting us. The…