IF you work for Brembo, you may be growing weary of hearing Haas F1 driver, Romain Grosjean, slate your product. It’s not like you don’t know how to make brakes or how to supply Formula 1 teams, you’ve been doing for years and years.
Regardless, this week’s test started off with a switch to Carbon Industrie brakes for Grosjean who has been complaining again this year about his Brembo’s. The report? Things seem good.
“We still have a lot of work to do around them and see the performance, but it feels better, as it was last year,” explained Grosjean after testing.
“Otherwise it’s quite similar. We just need to see if we can actually make it work with all our mapping.”
So they feel better during testing but it seems they too will take some tweaking to get them exactly the way Romain likes them.
“We can see on the data that some parts are better,” he said. “Since China we’ve got some updates on the Brembo brakes and that was working much better. But we had to wait a year-and-a-half to get the updates.
“Now we’ve put on the other ones, I’ve got better modulation to the end of braking, which I like. If we get it where we want to have it, it will be good.”
I think the point here, to be fair to Brembo, is that Romain likes a very particular feel to his brake pedal and maybe he is just finding the Carbon Industrie brake more to his liking but taking the stuffing out of the Italian brake company seems slightly heavy handed.
Perhaps it was the waiting for upgrades that put him over the edge and to be fair to Grosjean, if you don’t have confidence the brakes will work, you get very nervous at over 200mph. I guess the good news is, if the team can get it sorted, they may run the new brakes for Russia.
Hat Tip: Motorsport
I agree with the take on feel. As an avid sim racer that’s the one thing that guys spend the most money modding and buying in general is the brake pedal. It can transform your lap more than anything else. I was chatting to one of my friends and he was just over joyed that he had the ability to stomp on his brake and not quite lock up. I can only imagine that feeling in amplified a million times when you are actually in a real race car going at an insane speed with millions of dollars on the… Read more »
“We still have a lot of work to do around them and see the performance, but it feels better, as it was last year,” explained Grosjean after testing.
Is that the same ‘last year’ when the Brembo brakes were spitting him into the wall?
Yeah, that’s the ‘better’ feeling I’d want back ;-)