In Brazil, 20% of the accidents involve commercial vehicles, the high load capacity and the big dimension of commercial vehicles, such bus and trucks, become this situation even more dangerous. To prevent crashes, robust parts and product validation methodologies are essential for a safer and cheaper transport. The drum brake is widely used in commercial transport, due to the cheaper cost of production. The disadvantage of the drum brake system it’s his low thermal dissipation, to decrease the vehicle velocity, the brake converts kinetic energy in thermal energy, causing loss of efficiency, degradation of material mechanical properties and life reduction, these thermal effects can be even more dangerous under extreme conditions, as overload, speeding, over adjustment (dragging), and bad system maintenance. Due the fact that the temperature affects significantly the vehicle performance, especially in drum brakes system, the friction pair is tested under the worst road scenarios, manufacturers often use dynamometers to safely reproduce severe load conditions applied in brake systems. The challenge is to comprehend and reproduce the thermal and mechanical effects on brake drums using Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) to develop safer and cheaper solutions for the commercial vehicles industry. This paper aims to show a case study for a drum brake system, studying the most common failures in dynamometers and their representation in finite element models, allowing an effective prototype project design before the component production. The main target of this study is to search solution ideas for the most common brake drum failures and a better knowledge of combined thermal and mechanical loads acting in the brake structure.