California Shop Tour : Stoptech Brakes
The last of my stops on my trip to beautiful California was to Stoptech brakes. Stoptech has a beautiful 75,000+ Sq/ft facility devoted to producing some of the best brake upgrades on the planet. I’ve had Stoptech on a number of my personal vehicles, so this particular stop was one that was marked on my map very earlier on. This particular location houses the sales center, engineering department, manufacturing, and warehouse for Stoptech and their sister brand Powerslot rotors. The facilities were top notch and I left impressed knowing that the majority of their products were produced right here in the US, not designed in one place, manufactured overseas, re boxed somewhere else and sold by a third party. The team takes pride in making cars stop faster, a principle many overlook when building a proper performance machine.
Stoptech has not one, but 2 of these massive brake dynos at their facility. The engineering department mans the controls from their office which is under lock and key. These machines allow Stoptech to safely test the limits of stock and aftermarket brake systems in a controlled environment. During my visit they were testing a stock GTR brake system to make sure they could improve on the factory system, fortunately they can so be on the lookout for GTR brake upgrades in the near future.
The entire production side of their warehouse was filled with CNC upon CNC, producing everything from caliper brackets, to rotor hats, to the calipers themselves. Stoptech produces the vast majority of their kits in house to make sure that lead times are reduced, and quality is kept to an absolute premium.
In this picture you can see the raw caliper castings as they come from the forgery. The trophy sport kits get further CNC work to reduce weight up to 15% for those looking for the absolute best track and street braking.
Rotor hats are machined in house and paired with matched rotor blanks. These hats and blanks are inventoried to make sure replacements are readily available for track junkies needing to replace the friction surfaces.
Stoptech produces all of their brake lines in house, both for stock replacement line kits, as well as their own big brake kits.
Every line gets put through the paces on a series of test benches to ensure they meet and exceed all specifications before being sent out to the customer.
The calipers also get put through their paces on a separate set of test benches designed to make sure the caliper conforms to all standards. These aren’t batch tested, but rather every single caliper and line produced at their facility gets tested before being put in a box and shipped to the end user. This type of attention to detail is something I love to see, especially from a component as important as a brake system part.
Even though everything Stoptech produces is done in house, they make sure to keep a large amount of parts inventory in stock so that lead times are kept to a minimum. Most kits can be assembled and shipped in 24 hours or less to ensure replacement parts and upgrades arrive to the customer when they need them. This picture shows the rows of calipers ready to get matched to their appropriate parts to produce big brake kits for just about every performance vehicle on the road today.
Here you can see a kit on the shelf ready to be shipped to a customer ready to put their car through the paces, this particular kit was one of their more popular applications, the E46 M3 (you may have seen a similar kit on Turner Motorsports winning M3 race car).
Stoptech and Powerslot have everything one needs to help their performance car get stopped quicker. From replacement rotors / pads / lines for your daily driver, to full out race big brake upgrades for both street cars and full track cars. The vast majority of the Stoptechs components are produced in house in California, so you can rest assured you’re dealing with only the highest quality products. Your braking system is the absolute last system you want to skimp out on and use low quality foreign replacements. These are upgrade kits designed to perform and you can rest assure any upgrade has been tested on the track, on test benches, and on the Brake dyno before it ever gets shipped out the door. Titan Motorsports carries the complete line of Stoptech and Powerslot products, we’ve spent years building the quickest imports in the world, and when it comes to slowing those cars down, Stoptech is a brand you can trust.
