Thread: 5.0
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Old 10-16-2011, 08:40 PM   #1915 (permalink)
m4a1mustang
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This is my brake review for the Mustang guys. Just keep in mind that they don't have much experience with Stillen as we do in the Z community so I had to add the background on it.

Quote:
After a hair over 21,000 miles in my Brembo-optioned 2011 5.0 I was in pretty immediate need to replace my brake pads and rotors. The Ferodo-compound pads are fantastic, but as we all know they dust up a storm and do quite a number on the factory rotors. So I set out to find replacement rotors and pads for street use.

Coming from the Nissan 370Z platform I am very familiar with Stillen as they make quite a market in the Nissan/Z community. I ran Hawk HPS pads on my 370 at Stillen's recommendation and was quite happy with their performance. They are (relatively) low dusting but maintain great repeatable stopping performance for a spiritedly-driven street car with good pedal feedback and a long life expectancy for a high-performance street brake pad.

I am also familiar with Stillen's sport brake rotors, which a number of friends in the Z community use successfully on their track applications. Not only does Stillen make rotors for the Z, but they also make them for the Mustangs which was great news to me. They are available in several flavors depending on your needs: Slotted, Cross-Drilled, Cross-Drilled & Slotted, and Hook-Slot (J-Hook).

I was tempted to go with the Hook-Slot design because of it's popularity in many track-oriented applications as they are known to have a good bit more initial bite than Slotted or Cross-Drilled rotors, but they also tend to wear the pads out a bit quicker and I have heard from some that they can be a bit noisier than other rotor types. So I decided to stick with the traditional slotted design as a bit of a compromise between a blank rotor and the hook-slot -- more initial bite than a blank rotor with some pad cleaning capability but not quite the wear associated with a more track-oriented Hook-Slot design.

Here are some installed pictures and my thoughts on my new setup:







A little bit of a detail shot here. I was impressed with the quality of the rotors... nice machining. Ignore the bits of dirt that you can see on the rotors -- that's a bit of grease transferred from my gloves to the rotors during the install.



Driving Impressions

After bedding the pads in properly and spending a few days driving the car in wet and dry conditions I am very pleased with the performance of the rotors and the pads. With the slotted rotors the HPS pads have a nice initial bite, moreso than with a blank rotor like when I ran them on my 370Z, which is definitely the feel that I was looking for.

On spirited drives these pads and rotors perform flawlessly. You get the nice initial bite as mentioned above and solid, consistent brake feel under both light and heavy braking. I got the chance to put them through a pretty good test on my local back roads and am left with the impression that they can definitely take just about all that you can throw at them with spirited street driving.

If you are like me and want a street pad/rotor combo that provides nice initial bite, solid feedback, and overall a (relatively) long lifespan with (again, relatively) low dust, I think this is a great option. Having run the HPS pads on my Z I was always impressed with them as a street pad, and now with Stillen's slotted rotors I think they are even better.

Another observation... Noise. I know a lot of people here are noise-sensitive, especially considering how loud the factory Ferodos can be. With brake-quiet grease (either the Permatex stuff you can buy at AutoZone or the supplied Hawk grease) the pads are very quiet.

A parting shot of the little baby rear rotors :



I hope you guys found this review helpful.
So as you can tell, I'm very pleased with the combo.

Also, I can't wait to tackle all my suspension stuff ahead of ZDayZ next year. Should be fun.
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