Recommendations for good pads and rotors?

Pentalab

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Slotted rotors are good. I use em as wear indicators. They also evacuate water and debris.
Cross drilled rotors is a wasted effort. They won't cool the rotors either, they actually make it worse, since you have reduced heatsink mass.
 

dark steed

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Slotted rotors are good. I use em as wear indicators. They also evacuate water and debris.
Cross drilled rotors is a wasted effort. They won't cool the rotors either, they actually make it worse, since you have reduced heatsink mass.

And they often start playing the “connect the dots“ game


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Pentalab

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And they often start playing the “connect the dots“ game


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You just nailed it. I saw a couple pix of a track car that was upended on it's drivers side...on a right hand sweeper. One of the rear rotors had...'connected the dots', an entire piece of rotor (the shape of a slice of pie) had fallen right out. The brake pads had dropped into the empty pie shape hole.... and the rear wheel locked up asap...causing the accident. That was I believe, a road course in Eastern Canada, somewhere in Ontario. After that, cross drilled rotors (front, and / or back) were banned permanently, right then and there...from that particular track..and a recommendation to do the same at other tracks. (slotted rotors are still permitted)

The cross drilled holes were too close together..and hairline cracks had started forming between adjacent holes. Between the hairline cracks proliferating, and the rotor's wearing thin, one finally cut loose. Other than the ..'cool factor', cross drilled is a dumb concept.
 

stevbd

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In my experience any brake pad that claims to be good on both street and track kind of sucks on both. I gave up trying to find one and just swap pads.

Like Norm I use G-Loc R-10 on 14" Brembos and plain Centric rotors on track and this works well for me, great bite and no fade. But I usually run on tracks that aren't very hard on brakes (Palmer MA) and I'm an intermediate driver running a stock car on 275 MPSS. If you have a faster car or are a faster driver then you probably want to move up to a higher temp pad.

Double check this but I also think if you are running the smaller oem brake setup, you are going to generate higher brake pad temps and for that reason also you may want to move up a level, maybe R-12 or something. Ask a pro.

I drive on the R-10 to the track and they are fine on the street but ridiculously noisy at slow speeds. Like, people staring at you wtf is wrong with your car level of noisy.

Go to the Vorshlag site and they have all the options spelled out for you.

By the way you can't go by brake mfr because every brand has so many different compounds. You can't just say "Hawk brakes are good," or whatever.
 

stevbd

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Well exhaust is good noise, these are shite noise.

But your point is well taken my car is way too quiet.
 

Juice

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I hate squeeky brakes too. lol. My rears were making horrible groaning after a track event, but only in reverse. After a few miles, it stopped making noise.
 

Forty61

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I hate squeeky brakes too. lol. My rears were making horrible groaning after a track event, but only in reverse. After a few miles, it stopped making noise.

Ah yes, the old ‘ignore it until it goes away’ method!
 

Midlife Crises

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I hate squeeky brakes too. lol. My rears were making horrible groaning after a track event, but only in reverse. After a few miles, it stopped making noise.
How many miles do you drive in reverse to quite the brakes? Mine make noise sometimes too and I’d like to give that a try.
 

Juice

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How many miles do you drive in reverse to quite the brakes? Mine make noise sometimes too and I’d like to give that a try.

Ok, let me be more specific: the rears were groaning when backing up ONLY. Normal driving there was no noise. And after some normal driving, they stopped making noise completely.
Better? lol
 

Norm Peterson

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I drive on the R-10 to the track and they are fine on the street but ridiculously noisy at slow speeds. Like, people staring at you wtf is wrong with your car level of noisy.
Slow speeds and low-energy braking where you're just barely dragging the brakes is the worst. Working some fairly hard braking into your street driving helps. May be more difficult for some than others to avoid the first or do much of the second, though.


Norm
 

JJ427R

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Though I'd share a bit I learned today. I contacted Dave Zeckhausen today regarding my brakes/pads, was given a little info about brake ducting and I also asked about possibly going to 2 piece rotors. Here was his response so thought I'd share.
Juice I know you mentioned rotor cracks and you have ducting so though this might interest you too....


My concern with adding brake ducting is it will lead to rapid, wide temperature swings and subsequent formation and spreading of microcracks. You'll start chewing through the 1-piece rotors because they'll crack much sooner.

Changing from 1-piece to floating rotors will NOT increase the thermal mass. Just the opposite. By replacing the heavy iron center section with lightweight billet aluminum, isolated thermally by float hardware, we're going to see higher peak temperatures. The same amount of thermal energy will all be in the rotor rings, thus higher temperatures.

One way to increase thermal mass is to switch from 355x32mm to 380x32mm front rotors. It's not a simple caliper bracket and rotor assembly change. It's an entirely different 6-piston front kit. That may run into wheel clearance issues, so I've attached a wheel fitment template that you can use to check, if you want.
 

Juice

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Heat cracks VS overheating and fading brakes, I will take cracks/ducting anyday.
2 sets of pads to one set of rotors is fine with me.
 

Norm Peterson

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My concern with adding brake ducting is it will lead to rapid, wide temperature swings and subsequent formation and spreading of microcracks. You'll start chewing through the 1-piece rotors because they'll crack much sooner.
Without ducting the pads and rotors will end up cycling between higher temperatures because they don't get to cool off as much between braking events. Which means that the calipers and the fluid inside the calipers will run hotter. Unlike an iron rotor or rotor ring, brake fluid cannot cope with over-temperature via fatigue usage, as it's simply going to boil right away the first time. That's a direct penalty of less cooling.

Ducting increases the rate of cooling, so the downward thermal transients are somewhat more severe with ducting. But the 'down' transients are much less severe than the 'up' transients from when you're on the brakes, which have a much greater effect on the magnitudes of the various thermal transient stress terms.

As best I can describe this, if the 'up' transients are of "X" magnitude, the unducted 'down' transients are of "Y" magnitude, and the ducted 'down' transients are of "Z" magnitude, the stress range from X to Z (X-Z, algebraically) is greater than the X to Y range (X-Y, algebraically), but not nearly in the ratio of Z to Y.


Norm
 
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JJ427R

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JJ427R

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Heat cracks VS overheating and fading brakes, I will take cracks/ducting anyday.
2 sets of pads to one set of rotors is fine with me.
Do these look like small heat cracks, appears they are? Not great pics .. you may need to zoom in on it..
IMG_7488.JPG IMG_7489.JPG
 

Juice

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Yup, there are a few tiny heat cracks, but that rotor looks like shit. I get new ones just because of all the groves.
 

JJ427R

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Yup, there are a few tiny heat cracks, but that rotor looks like shit. I get new ones just because of all the groves.
Believe I only have 5 track days on those... :( New one's are on order, trying to make the last track day of the year at BIR Oct 5th....
 

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