Performance Brakes are one of the best and least expensive modifications you can do to increase the overall performance of your vehicle. Having good success with Hawk Performance Brakes in the past, we opted for the new Hawk Quiet Slot Rotors paired up with Hawk HT-10 Racing Brake Pads for the front and Hawk HP Plus Brake Pads for the rear. We chose this combination because we didnt want the initial bite to be too harsh under braking since our car is so light, yet it is still capable of handling the heat we will be putting them under. Our CRX was already equipped with DC2 Integra brakes front and rear, which will provide more than enough braking force to help bring our CRX down to safe speeds, especially once equipped with the Hawk Brakes.

It seems as if we always end up working into the late hours of the night on this car, and this night was no exception. Since we only work on the car after work hours, we normally dont get started until 6 or 7pm. We were scheduled to have the car dyno tuned the next morning by Alpha at Induction Performance, so we wanted to make sure our brakes were in good working order and that our motor had fresh oil and spark plugs for the tuning session. A simple brake job and engine tune-up is easy and shouldnt take us any time at all right? Wrong. Once we had all of the brakes installed, we found that the we had a "stuck" front passenger caliper and it was now showing its face with the new thicker brake pads. Even without the brakes being applied, the car would stop itself, almost like the e-brake was still on. Luckily, we had some spare parts, and just happened to have a set of Integra front brakes sitting at the house not being used. After we picked up the spare brake caliper, it was a fairly quick change out and the brakes felt good again, so we proceeded to flush the brake lines with Motul RBF600 Brake Fluid to keep up with the temps our brakes will see on the track. Even though we were in a private-owned industrial area, still I am sure the surrounding neighbors thought kindly of us for bedding in the brakes at 1am!

Read more about our experience on our blog! Brakes Pros Blog

Tyler began with the rear brakes while I degreased and washed the wheels to make the car more presentable.



Our new Hawk Quiet Slot Rotors with Hawk HP Plus Performance Pads Installed in the rear.



Once the rears were done, Tyler removed the front wheels and cleaned them while I worked on installing the new front brakes.






Fitting the new Hawk HT-10 Racing Pads into the front caliper.






Front brake installation complete.






After we installed the brakes, we changed out the spark plugs for a fresh set of NGK Laser Iridiums and we changed the oil and oil filter with Mobil 1.















Rotors Used For 94-01 Acura Integra Brake Upgrade:
Front PN#: Hawk Quiet Slot Rotors HUS522
Rear PN#: Hawk Quiet Slot Rotors HUS308


Brake Pads Used For 94-01 Acura Integra Brake Upgrade:
Front PN#: Hawk HT-10 Racing Brake Pads HB245S.631
Rear PN#: Hawk HP Plus Brake Pads HB350N.496


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Our CRX already had a basemap on it using Hondata KPro, which when I drove the car for the first time with Chris, ran really well. By the time we were able to get the car to the dyno at Induction Performance, we had a pretty bad misfire and we were barely able to pull the car in and out of our trailer under its own power. We didnt know exactly what was wrong, we already changed the spark plugs, which would help but only for a few minutes. We knew we needed a complete tune to get the car running right. Having known Alpha for a few years, we decided to bring our CRX to his shop, Induction Performance, to have the car dyno tuned. After Alpha got the base tune down on the car, he started making some full throttle pulls and we could tell he wasnt getting the results he was looking for. Alpha explained to us that he was throwing as much fuel at the car as he possibly could through Kpro and that our injectors were almost static(100% duty) and our AF ratio was still only reading high 12's. We were all kind of scratching our heads, knowing the engine was stock, there was no way it could be running out of fuel on the stock injectors already. We tried calling some local shops to see if we could find some injectors for our K-Series, but we had no luck. We had an Auto-X coming up in just a couple days, so Alpha was able to tune the car to get by for the time being, our final Air/Fuel ratio at WOT was 12.8:1 with our injectors nearly 100% maxed out, not optimal, but still in the safe zone. After the tune, we could immediately notice the car ran much smoother, but it didnt like low rpms as it would stutter and cause you to clutch in to avoid having the car buck. To get past this, you just had to throttle it up again and it was fine under WOT. Alpha suggested we get new injectors, so we ordered a set of Injector Dynamics ID-725's for our K20. Slightly overkill for our project, however we will be running E85(which uses more fuel) once we get re-tuned and if we ever decide to go higher compression or add cams, we will still have plenty of fuel left without having to buy new injectors again.

At the end of the day we only made 193whp, which is WAY low on power for the mods we had. Besides the injectors, we had a couple other things that may have contributed to our car not making power though. For one, we had no intake on the car since we needed to have one custom built and we ran out of time before the dyno day. We were also running open header, which is not too big a deal, but from talking to some friends of ours(shout out to Matt Mansfield at StrictlyMT!), a short pipe with a dump would gain us a couple WHP along with the intake. We have some exciting updates on both of these issues that I will come back to later. We will be going back to Alpha with the new ID725cc injectors, custom cold air intake and a custom exhaust on our CRX in the near future, we are excited to see what we can get out of it with these additional modifications on top of the E85!

Once we got the car back home, we were getting the car ready for the Auto-x weekend, we decided to throw in some stock k-series injectors from our friend Tylers car. We had a strong suspicion the injectors were bad in our car, so we decided we had nothing to loose. Once we fired up the car again, I could immediately notice the difference, the car ran amazingly smooth and all the stuttering was no longer present. I decided to take the car around the block to see how it ran, to my surprise, the car now ran at a solid 10:1 Air/Fuel ratio at WOT! This was good news and we no longer had to worry about the car running lean for our auto-x event, we would just run these injectors for the weekend until we take the car back to be re-tuned.

K20 Honda CRX Dyno Tuning at Induction Performance - YouTube

Read more about our experience on our blog! Brakes Pros Blog