The Fastest Complete Brake Change Ever Goes Down in Just Over a Minute!
If there’s one aspect of racing that might be a little bit underappreciated, it’s that of the pit crew. No matter which league the rides in question are racing under from NASCAR to Formula One and everything in between, each respective pit crew has its own set of challenges ahead of them. However, with those challenges on deck, these pit crew members that are nothing short of pure athletes ready to get to work, changing out components in a frenzy.
Most of the time, during a pit stop, cars will undergo a variety of common maintenance. Throughout the course of a race, tires will be worn and need to be replaced. Naturally, fuel comes alongside the tires as well, as crew chiefs are left to a calculation to figure out just how much of each will be necessary.
Every once in a while, though, things simply go a little bit beyond tires and fuel. Instead, sometimes, catastrophic undertakings happen out there on the race track and require different, more permanent fixtures to be replaced. For example, in most cases, we don’t see pit crews out there changing out brakes most of the time.
In this particular situation, we check out a pitstop that is anything but conventional, though. During the stop, the crew actually takes on the challenge of swapping out the brakes on the car. In most cases, this would be a death sentence for a team’s hopes of winning. After all, when every second matter, Being out for a couple of minutes could be too big of a challenge to overcome. It doesn’t matter how good of a driver someone is, certain things can really just put a team out of the race entirely.
In this situation, though, the pit crew changed out the pads, calipers, and rotors on the front of their car in what might just be one of the quickest pit stops we have ever witnessed. In the span of just 50 seconds or so, the crew was able to carry out what would take most average people a couple of hours to execute. Sure, in the scheme of things, nearly a minute is a ton of time to make up for but it’s not impossible. Sometimes, the role of the pit crew is just making sure that they put their driver in a position where they still have a shot at victory, no matter what work needs to be done.
