[Apogee]

For what it's worth, I'll throw my $.02 in the hat. It's important to keep in mind that "stopping power" is not necessarily a meaningful measure of a brake system since ultimately it's your tires that are the limiting factor, not the brakes. A properly set up brake system should be able to achieve lockup at reasonable pedal inputs...anything beyond that doesn't do anything for you.

When CPP says that their big-brake kits have 60% more stopping power than a C5/C6 kit, they appear to be strictly referring to the difference in piston area between the C5/C6 (3.97 in^2) and Tahoe calipers (6.58 in^2). While you could say that they are technically correct in their statement, it is completely misleading in my opinion to state it in such a way since brake torques are a function of pressure and piston area (negating pad CoF and rotor diameter for the sake of not needlessly complicating this argument), not piston area alone. To be clear, if you supplied both calipers with the same pressure of 1000 psi, you would get more clamping force from the larger piston area since Force = Pressure x Area, 3970 versus 6580 pounds of force respectively. If lockup occurs at 4000 pounds of clamping force, what does the additional "stopping power" gain you? If you answer nothing, you would be correct. Most OE disc brake applications on GM muscle cars have more piston area than even the CPP kits at 6.77 in^2 with the 2-15/16 single piston calipers, so if you like their argument, then you should stick with your OE discs.

The reality is that if the master cylinder is properly sized for the calipers, they can both be made to generate similar clamping forces and brake torques. A performance brake kit should provide larger rotors with more thermal mass so that you can brake harder, longer, without any appreciable decrease in performance. If you just want to decrease your stopping distances, invest in the stickiest tires you can find and ABS.

Tobin
KORE3