Brake Fluid

About Brake Fluid

Good brake fluid is one of the most important parts of ensuring that your brakes are performing responsively. By dealing with the heat and pressure generated by your vehicle's particular brakes, the right brake fluid will deliver the best brake pedal feel, the best braking ability in adverse weather conditions and the confidence to step on the brake pedal in extreme emergency situations.

Brake fluid DOT 4 and brake fluid DOT 3 are the typical types of brake fluid available for the braking system of a regular vehicle, and are classified based on their boiling point. But before exploring how these two types of brake fluid affect your brake system, it's important to get an understanding of how they work.

How Brake Fluids Work

Brake Fluid is the hydraulic fluid that converts the movement of you pressing down your brake pedal into the force needed to compress your calipers and brake pads against the brake rotors in your braking system. The effectiveness and performance parameters that define a brake fluid is set by its DOT number, which roughly translates to its boiling point.

Many passenger cars use either a DOT 3 brake fluid or a DOT 4 brake fluid as standard, and as it goes up in number the boiling point gets higher. As your brake fluid heats up, it's vital that it doesn't start to boil and affect your braking performance, meaning that high performance cars with larger, higher temperature brakes use either a DOT 4 brake fluid or, especially in the case of race cars, a DOT 5 brake fluid.

Why Good Brake Fluid is Important

Because your vehicle's brakes generate high amounts of heat while they bring your car to a stop, brake fluid has a very high tolerance to both heat and extreme amounts of cold to prevent it from either freezing or boiling under extreme conditions.

Either of these scenarios would be disastrous to your braking performance, and be incredibly detrimental to your safety on the road, so it always pays to invest in a quality, reliable brake fluid. Choosing a great brake fluid can improve braking responsiveness and provide a far superior pedal feel from your brakes, meaning you get a safer feeling stop, every time.

The higher quality brake fluid you get for your vehicle, be it one of the two DOT 3 or DOT 4, will also lengthen the performance lifetime of your brake system, so investing in this crucial part of your vehicle can often mean savings in the long run and a lower chance of brake failure.

Our Range of Brake Fluids

Spares Box offers an outstanding range of brake fluids for all vehicles, from an every day passenger vehicle to some of the world's most high performance machines. Penrite's DOT 3 & DOT 4 Brake Fluid and Nulon's Xtreme Performance Brake Fluid are both outstanding every day brake fluids for use in a huge range of passenger vehicles, while Castrol React SRF brake fluid offers incredible braking feel in high performance and race vehicles that generate the most extreme conditions, and with its boiling point can maintain performance even under intense braking.