Most severe application in race car brakes

"...NASCAR iron discs are known to approach 1300 degrees Fahrenheit. Brembo engineers consider NASCAR the most severe application in race-car brakes. The cars are fast, heavy (3500 lb.) and restricted to 15-in. wheels which, in turn, limit disc diameter. This is countered by making the discs especially think: 40 mm, around 1.6 in. Calipers must be standard aluminum. Intensive Computational Flow Dynamics techniques are used to optimize cooling airflow around these components and also in defining the geometry of disc vanes."

- Road & Track September 2005

One of Newton's law's of physics, "mass in motion tends to stay in motion." Stock cars have a lot of kinetic energy, so that's why they use so much brake. If you notice when they run at Martinsville or Richmond, (especially Richmond @ night) those brake rotors glow bright orange. If they don't properly cool those things off, brake fade is inevitable and someone's gonna wreck.

On a long green flag run at Martinsville, I'd be surprised if the temps were that low. I would expect rotor temps to peak at about 1700F if the brakes are being used hard. I've worked on a couple of (non-NASCAR) cars where the 1500 F temperature paint had not just changed colors, but burnt off entirely.

CFD is used for rotor vane design in most racing, and now many high performance street brake rotor applications.

I don't disagree with the conclusion, but the tempreature numbers seem low to me.