I wanted to upgrade my car’s brakes, but who would make a brake kit for a Cruze? With its very de-tuned engine, it’s not really considered a performance car, but it looks pretty sporty! It’s also raced in quite a few racing series around the world, so who knows?
I started by researching what kits were available. I found several companies making kits and stumbled across something exciting. I discovered the Cruze and the Sonic share the exact same front calipers and rotors. The GM part numbers are identical! With this new knowledge, I expanded my search to include the Sonic, and guess what name popped up? Brembo! Brembo is a reputable company with a long history in racing, and since I had never heard of the other companies offering kits, the choice was easy for me.
The next question was, how well would they work? A lot of engineering goes into developing brake kits to work with a specific car, so I needed to find out if the Brembo’s were engineered right for my car. I contacted my friend, James Walker, JR., to see if he could help me with this process. James is an engineer specializing in chassis, brake, and electronic brake control systems. I wanted to know if the Brembo’s pressure-torque relationship is close to the stock brakes. I gathered all the required data from the stock brakes, and the data Brembo sent on their brakes and emailed it to James. The results were not all that surprising given Brembo’s reputation in racing. It turned out that the Brembo output was within 95% of the stock output. Since I’m retaining the stock rear brakes, the car will be slightly less biased towards the front, and for a track car, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Stock systems are usually heavily front-biased, and on the track, that usually means slower lap times. The brake gurus say to increase the rear brake bias to the point where it scares the crap out of you, then dial it back to the front slightly. All that can be done with different pad compounds, so I didn’t see any reason not to move forward with the Brembo’s.
| Piston 1 | Piston 2 | Effective Area | Rotor OD | Effective Radius | Normalized Torque | ||
| Stock | 63.5 | 0.0 | 3165 | 276 | 106.25 | 336315 | |
| Brembo | 36.0 | 40.0 | 2273 | 328 | 139 | 315997 | 94% |
I now know the Brembo’s are well within the ballpark for engineering, so now I must answer the next question. Would they fit? We already know the calipers and rotors are the same for the Cruze and Sonic, but the steering knuckle and hub are not the same. Does that matter? No, it doesn’t. If you think about it, the rotor and the caliper are the same, so no matter what hub or knuckle is on there, the spacing must be the same. I guess there could always be that .1% chance, but I had faith.
It was now Valentine’s Day, and what better gift to give my baby than a sexy big brake upgrade! After removing the stock calipers and rotors, I ran into my first challenge. For the new rotor to go on, I had to remove the dust shield. Instead of unbolting the hub and completely removing it, I cut the shield off with metal sheers. I was able to cut it fairly close to the hub, and once the new rotor was on, you couldn’t see it anyway. Completely removing the shield would be a bit more work, as you would have to remove the axle nuts, remove the wheel speed sensor, unbolt the hub from the knuckle, and free the axle from the hub. Plus, the axle nuts should be replaced with new ones once they are removed. It seems like a lot, but cutting the shields literally took a couple of minutes.
Once the shield was out of the way, I installed the caliper brackets, the new rotors, and the new calipers. The whole installation went smoothly, and the new rotor was perfectly centered within the caliper. From there, I disconnected the stock lines, installed the new braided lines, and started the bleeding process.
So, the brakes fit nicely on the car, but I still had one more question I needed to answer. Will the stock wheel clear the new caliper? Of course not, but I pre-planned. I had purchased a set of 15mm and 20mm spacers just in case. Smart, eh? I installed the spacers, and all was good. Well, almost. The stock studs have that dog-end, speed tip, or whatever term you want to use, but those tips had to be cut off for the wheel to mount flush against the spacer. I eventually wound up putting the 20mm on the front and the 15mm on the rear, and it worked out nicely. The tires are flush with the outer fenders now, which made it look a little more aggressive.
So, there you have it, folks. Brembo GT brakes on a Cruze!
DS