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I’ve been wrenching my cars for 40 years and am a retired mechanical engineer. Todays cars are way more complicated and more precise by design and function. There is far less that I can do nowadays on my cars than even 15 years ago. I can’t even easily check oil condition as there are no more dipsticks.
For the same diameter rotor and identical calipers & pads, drilled rotors have less surface contact at the pad, obviously due to the holes. That is why simply installing just drilled rotors to replace non-drilled has less performance. Slotted is better, but not bybtoo much and I never liked the look. Cars with drilled rotors by design (or rotor/caliper sets) always have either/and or larger calipers with more pads surface area that makes up for the holes reduced contact area and larger rotors, which do provide superior performance in basically all conditions. I will never track this car (or likely even get on a track again, with the BMW Performance Center being the only possibility and that’s not really a track) so extreme high speed performance or bragging rights is not the reason.
BMW brakes, in general, are excellent. I certainly am not 2nd guessing the engineers on this. The more I think about it, the more I realize I never should have brought this up, as these modern brake systems just have too much interrelationships with electronics and such, that it is best to leave them as is.
It was a gut post because one of the nicer features of my Carrera was the brakes, and one of the first things I noticed was this difference.
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