Street/ Track Brake Pads
 

Which brake pads for street and track events do you guys recommend?

Hawks HP
Hawks HPS
Ferodo
Carbon tech
DBA

Thanks,

I've done 6 trackdays on a set of EBC YellowStuff pads. Had no problems with them. Planning on changing to something else for next year.

Haven't seen many do both. Most will tell you to run different pads and scrub/rebed after use.

So. I asked. What pads are the MOST aggressive without squealing... If you don't mind the squeal, your choices are almost endless. Personally, I went with Project Mu pads. Aggressive without the squeal. B-Force or B-something (there is a JDM name and USDM name for "the same pads," and not Bestop) and NS400s for the rear. No issues, I think they're worth the price. (And you can occasionally get them for CHEAP)


Honestly, swap pads at the track though. It's a BIT of a pain, but it's not THAT bad

I run HP+ on street and track. They do excellent. I recommend them.

I'm a big carbotech fan. Great products and great company

Thanks, I was thinking of Hawks HP or BDA...

Hps suck worse than the oem pads..

Get dedicated street and track pads. Good street pads suck on the track and vice versa. It's an easy swap at the track or the night before.

I hear lots of complaints about HPS's. For one they are noisy as hell on street.

I just switched to endless mx72's and am loving them, but haven't had them long enough to comment other than so far fantastic.(but yeah very expensive)

I hear a lot of good things about Mu's.

Never hear anything bad about carbotechs.

raybestos ST47 for track and use stock for street.

project mu club racers if u want to run a single pad, I dd on this and track on them

I installed yellow stuff pads before tracking the in early October and they did great on the track. Off the track they squeak a little and make some dust but I'm happy with the performance of them.

I also use the Hawk HP+ pads just for race day. They squeal a tiny bit but their cold bite is great and they really did an awesome job I thought on AutoX AND the road course. My rotors are a bit noisy now and it looks like they definitely left some deposits or something on them but overall I'm still breaking fine. Hoping whenever these go that I can switch over to DBA 2 piece slotted rotors instead. All I have done for the track is the motul rbf600 fluid, hawk hp+ pads and z1 stainless steel lines.

Oh almost forgot.... One downside is they dust like CRAZY! But that's expected.

I highly recommend staying away from hp+ for road coarse I fade those pads in 2 laps threw then away

You're thinking of HP+.

HPS's are silent, but have no business on the track after you've done your first day/learned how to carry any actual speed.

I have them on my DD and would never, ever want them on a car that I tracked if I could help it, the pedal feel is just awful.

I have used Endless MX72 Pads for several track days and they have served me very well, very good pedal feel with no noticeable fade. Can do about 2 track weekends on one set if they start off new. Use them on the street as well, they do dust more but feel great. Only squeal occasionally once you get them up to track temp, never at low temps. Don't chew through rotors either. Endless also makes possibly the best brake fluid with a higher boiling point than motul. Also, have not had any issues with icemode running this material F/R with stock suspension. Endless also posts the effective operating temps for these on their site, for the MX72 it reports that friction varies from .37-.48 up to a top operating temp of 700 C (iirc).

wow surprised u go through so many pads lol. 1 pair of pads last me almost a whole year, need to brake less LOL!!

2 track weekends (4 track days, 4 sessions/day, 16 twentyish minute sessions total) on one set of pads is pretty good imho :) And even at that you've got to keep in mind your getting more heat transfer through the pads and into the fluid/caliper towards the end due to the decreasing thickness.

What kind of wear are others getting?


Edit: This is assuming 1/4 or more pad left at the end. Reasoning stated above. Also the second half of the pads wear slightly more quickly due to the amount of heat cycles the deeper pad material has already undergone.

lol I got about 45 track days, time attacks and all, I only went through 2-3 sets of front pads and 2 rears. Still on stock rear rotor, and barely on 2nd set of front rotor!!

Hmmm, I will take a look at those club racers for sure. Thing is, from people I've talked to at the track my pad wear is pretty standard for someone who uses their brakes aggressively, and (recent) historically I am one of the faster/est cars running street tires in the HPDE groups. I dunno /shrug. :driving:

My YellowStuffs have 6 trackdays on them. That's 3, 30 minute sessions each day. And about 2,000 street miles on them. I'll be changing them out next spring. As the Z will sit for most of the winter.

16 sessions for a set of pads seems a little bit much to me. Are you turning your rotors every time? If not you should. What kind of rotors are you using? Are you bedding them correctly? Just can't believe 16 sessions is the issue. Then again I will find out soon once I start using the MX72's lol.

They get bedded in just fine on the first few warmup laps of the weekend. I think these 1st few laps are the perfect environment to do so. Once that is done a good layer of pad material will stay on the rotors the rest of the weekend until the weekend is over and the layer gets scrubbed off. I make sure to warm up my brakes gradually (avoiding threshold braking during this time) and also try my best to cool them a bit gradually as well. I use the new design slotted DBA 5000 series 2-piece rotors in the front and the 4000 series in the rear. I also have installed the stillen front brake ducting which seems to be effective and seems to have reduced heat stress cracking on the rotor surface; which is why I end up replacing my rotors once they get large enough to catch your thumbnail on. I have yet to groove or wear a set to death. Except perhaps the stock front rotors which I put a hurting on. Front end of the car actually scrapes the ground a bit under hard braking sometimes once the tires are warm; Ive put adhesive teflon furniture movers on the bottom of the leading edge to act as "sacrificial anodes", if you will, in response to that. Sorry if this has gotten a bit off topic, did my best to contribute meaningfully lol.

Why do you say I should turn my rotors every time, I am not getting uneven deposits, switching pad materials, nor warping them, I see no reason to turn them.

If you are talking to me. I got 18 sessions on my pads. And they need to be changed. My first 2 trackdays. I was learning the car and track. I was a bit easy on the brakes at first. I was getting back in to doing trackdays again. Switching from bike to car. :D I'm running the Racing Brake 2 piece rotors front and rear.

Well just because you can't "see" anything wrong with them, doesn't mean they are perfectly flat. There's visual inspection, then there is .05 inches.

You may not need it every time, but prolly once a year I would think to make sure they are truly flat. I just see it as a possible source as to why you are burning pads so fast. I know what Endless pads cost. :tup:

I know some guys go the route of just buying cheap-o rotors and then basically throw them away instead of turn them. It is cheaper than buying 900.00 rotors, paying t0 turn them, then cracking them next weekend and having to buy new ones. They basically treat them like disposables.

This is the best method if you can't afford to replace the rings regularly.

I have the 5000 series 2 piece on the front, and I'm really considering going to some AC Delcos or something once these need servicing. I just don't think the weight difference justifies paying 4-5 times as much.

Better to use them and lose them, imo.

my friend used the dba5000 also, said the wear wasn't any different than stock, so i'm running stock rotors only on my 2nd pair upfront!!!

You sure you're not thinking the HPS pads? It may have been my first road course event but the car was driven hard, and I didn't do so bad (instructor wanted to bump me up a group). I've also done two autox events on the same pads (which I know aren't as hard on the brakes, but still some abuse). They have a ton of life left from what I remember.

Sub'd to read later on.


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i hate my hps+, once it gets hot on the track, stopping power goes out the window :(

carbotech xp12front and xp10 rear are what im getting next

Thanks guys, great info. :tup:

Well to OP and anyone else, I just spent first weekend on Endless MX72's I did 2 full days(10 Sessions) on them at AAA speedway.

For reference AAA speedway is known as RMR(rich man's raceway) and is also considered the "car killer course" because it is extremely demanding on your tech. There are 3 straight aways that go from ~135+50mph 90/90 degree chicane, next is ~100-35mph hairpin, next is ~100-60 mph esses back to back to back.

That will heat your brakes up.

I can say I think I boiled my fuel a little bit on one session, but never felt any brake pad fade whatsoever. I lost a little bit of pedal which I think indicates boiling, but it returned by next session. But I never felt that "oh sh!t pads just turned into mashed potatoes feel".

They ran perfect for two days with no fade and they don't squeak at all on street. As far as dust goes IDK my wheels were dirty when I got there, but there is no reason in hell you would ever spend this type of money on street pads.

There's a lot of personal preference in brake stuff, too. Different driving styles = different heat profiles, different kinds of abuse, etc. Maybe even how you interpret bedding and swap instructions and how you do your maintenance.

But just to throw another track setup opinion in here, what I ended up settling on is Carbon-Lorraine's various RC5/6 compounds, which Essex imports/sells here: Essex - CL Brakes . I've used them in two configs: stock sport calipers RC6 front RC5+ rear, and APRacing's BBK with RC6-E in all 4 corners. They're really top notch track pads, and they wear slow and they don't destroy rotors. They even stop fine cold on the street, but they will make ugly noises that street users don't like. I like the pedal feedback, modulation, and performance even better than Carbotech, and I've had zero issues with tossing out junked rotors since I switched, too, but who knows what else besides pads contributed to fixing that. They don't require a real bedding process, either, which is a big win (even if you're swapping from other pads). They just self-bed as they go and it all works out. Properly doing a quick brake system warmup during your track warmup laps is always a good thing, though, and it's always good to properly break in new rotors in terms of heat cycle on the metal. The only downside is they're pretty expensive - but IMHO with the saved grief on brake issues and the long life of the pads, it's well worth it.

As others have said, there is no magical unicorn pad that's great on both street and track, though.

I ran Carbon-Lorraine pads on my track bikes and loved them. Now you got me thinking about them for the Nismo. ;)

I want to add that I thought the MX 72 lacked a little "last split second bite" when you do that final "oomph" don't expect a lot of change in the characteristic. This caused me to almost go off and I killed a kitten(the kittens that live under cones). I dragged it through a sweeper then it landed offline and stayed there for the next 3 hours.

That being said, if you want to trail brake, this is a really good pad to do so. It is probably not a good Auto X pad because of that. It is not bitey at all, just very smooth and controllable. If you are trying to brake hard and deep, this is not the pad. If you want all day consistent performance on a road course, it is very very good.

Err... Big difference there, are you talking about the HPS or the HP +? The HPS is more of a street pad and I've heard its no good on the track. The HP+ I've used work just fine.

Over the course of 10 years instructing on track, we've found the HPS to be a beginner pad at best. Figure once you progress out of DE 1 or 2 you should be stepping up to a more track oriented pad. There are no silver bullets here in terms of street and track use, as others have said ideally swapping pads for the track the day before is probably your best bet. However that isn't always done as easily as folks think.

Hawk HP+ are great for street and auto-x and DE1,2 and into 3, lots of dust and squealing
Stoptech Street Performance are a higher temp pad than the HP+, squeal less and dust less
Carbo Loraine makes a pad (the exact model escapes me right now) that we've found to be a great street and track pad even up to the higher levels of DE.

Driving style and particular tracks will also effect your pad choices as well. A lot of it is trial and error unfortunately.

-mike

Yeah, back on the CL RC pads subject, I edited out a short clip from two weeks ago to throw into this thread, highlighting just one braking zone where I nailed it pretty well (I'm not yet a pro-level driver, so those moments can be rare!).

If you watch the g-force cross on the bottom you can see where I managed to roll fast and smooth into the brake pedal right up to the ~1g limit on crappy street tires and then roll back out smoothly into a downshift + slight trail into the turn. There was no lockup or ABS engagement there and it was all over in the blink of an eye. These pads make that kind of work much easier :)