Originally Posted by FLHX1550

Smart Brake is like a "2-Stage" Drag Brake. It essentially will give you a "High-speed" drag brake and a "normal" drag brake, and can really help with consistency at the end of a strait-away, especially with a tight sweeping corner at the end of it.

You have basically 2 settings that you can use with Smart Brake:

Max Brake Strength - This is the amount of brake you want to apply at "high-speed"

Trigger RPM - This is the rpm in which the VTX will apply the Max Brake Strength setting.

Lets say we use the following setup.

10.5 Motor
Max Brake Strength (Smart Brake) - 80%
Trigger RPM 16,000RPM
Drag Brake - 25%

With the above settings, you will go down the strait-away and let off to neutral and the VTX will apply 80% brake on it's own until the motor deaccelerates down to the 16,000RPM setting. When the motor us under the trigger RPM setting, the VTX will proportionally decrease the brake down to the regular "Drag Brake" setting.

IMO the Smart Brake system could be quite beneficial in the on-road world, where you have very high-speed, sweeping turns at the end of the straits. It will take some confidince to trust the esc, because in order to engage it, you need to go to Neutral at the exact point you are used to grabbing a bunch of brake. It will take some getting used to.

In off-road, it may or may not be able to be used, as track layouts tend to be more "point and shoot" at the end of your high-speed sections, or have technical sections (jumps). Also, with big jumps that require allot of throttle to get over them, one would have to be careful when jumping to NOT go to neutral as you will engage the 70 or 80% of brake that you have set in the Max Brake Strength. It has been common for people to use Drag Brake to adjust "attitude" when jumping, so I can see it being very important to be very consistent when jumping using the Smart Brake.

Now you can use just Drag Brake by setting the Brake Strength for the Smart Brake to 0%, and you will have traditional Drag Brake.

You can also use just the Smart Brake by setting the Drag Brake setting to 0%.

All of the settings will be very track specific (the settings will change from layout to layout, and as the day changes with varying traction levels), so this is something that will take some getting used to, to learn how the settings will work on the track. But there have been drivers in Asia running on-road who have managed to better their lap times by up to .4 sec just by using the Smart Brake.