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Have them on order and should be installing next weekend along with Centric rotors. Not sure I'll be able to give a good comparison though since my current brakes are basically shot. Anything will be an upgrade.
I use the old ones, love them. Car stops like it hit something at the track again and again. If I press harder, I get a chirp and ABS, so I cannot use any more. The standard ones are also great on rotors. I still have my original ones at 133K.
Interested too in how the new ones work, but cannot imagine what improvement would look like.
Have you had fading at the tracks? I was at sebring earlier this year, had Racing Brake ET500 on. They heated up real bad and I cooked the brakes in like the 3rd session. 1st and 2nd session I took it slow and was trying to learn the track though.
I am interested in these too. I was running Hawk HP Plus, but they crumbled on me at one of the faster local tracks. Rotors are shot too. I liked the feel and balance of the HP+ pads, but I disliked the noise and inability to handle heat.
I have been beating myself up for a couple of weeks on which direction to go.
EBC Stage 5? Carbotech XP10? Stoptech Sport? Hawk 5.0? Power Stop Z26? Some combination? Argh. I'll probably start a new thread.
Last edited by Steve Dallas; 01-09-2015 at 07:22 AM.
My first time out in the RX8 (far from my first time ever), I used HP+ with stock tires and they worked fine, but when I went to R's, I switched to Hawk DTC-60's and am really happy with them. They are great on track and actually quite civil on the street for the drive to and from the track. If you're having issues with a street friendly pad overheating and crumbling, sounds like you need to make the switch to real race pads.
I have not seen a fading problem. Biggest issue is over breaking. That is purely a cockpit problem. I run a 200 treadwear tire (Rival at this time) so there is plenty of grip.
Let me know when you go back to Sebring. I want to go again. I live in Oviedo, not to far. I grew up in Pine Hills when it was safe, and spent a lot of time on your lakes.
If interested, we are heading to Roebling next weekend. That is a great place to sort out a car. There are still a few openings...
I bought a set along with some new rotors, but I haven't gotten around to installing them yet. I will probably do it next month, so I will have time to bed them in before the season starts in March.
I installed these Street/Race pads along with a set of StopTech Sport rotors about 100 miles ago. The pads appear to be high quality and come with a nice set of shims and a packet of grease, which I quickly added to stvnscott's box of random grease packets. I used my usual ceramic grease instead.
I have driven them on the street only to date to break them in and get them ready for track use. So far, what I have to say about them is they seem to have more bite than HP Plus, but not as much as a true track pad. They are definitely quieter than HP Plus. There is some squeal, but my car does not howl like a school bus like it did when running HP Plus. They are more heat sensitive than HP Plus, meaning they do not bite as well until they have some heat in them. It is kind of like running on OEM pads for the first few miles until they warm up, then they become very "stoppy" as one of my track friends puts it when the torque comes on.
Time will tell if they are truly capable of heat up to 1200 degrees. My first track day of the season is the 7th of next month.
Last edited by Steve Dallas; 04-01-2015 at 08:44 AM.
Have you had fading at the tracks? I was at sebring earlier this year, had Racing Brake ET500 on. They heated up real bad and I cooked the brakes in like the 3rd session. 1st and 2nd session I took it slow and was trying to learn the track though.
ET500 is no good for track use on a 2900 lbs+ vehicle
Following this too, please let us know. I am running HP plus. They work very well on the track but sound like a school bus around town. I am in socal and our tracks don't have enough hard braking zone to cook the HP plus.
I frequent 3 tracks in my area. One of them, Eagle's Canyon Raceway, is murder on brakes. I don't think I'm going back there because of that reason, and because it is not a particularly good track for the RX-8. It is often described as a series of drag strips followed by U-turns. A lot of cars have had to quit early due to brake issues there when I have been there.
The other 2 tracks have enough open track days between them to get me up to at least 10 track days this year. I think I will focus on those. They are both much more varied and much easier on brakes. I did the last track day of last season on OEM brakes at one of these tracks and did not fade them very much, to give you an idea.
Anyway, I'll post back and let everyone know how they hold up. I don't have my hopes up, but I am still [probably futilely] trying to find a hybrid pad that will more or less work for me.
What temperature do you mean when you say "cold bites". I see you live in Florida, so I assume you aren't talking extreme cold.
I only have extreme summer and DOT track tires to choose from, so I don't drive my car when it is below about 45 degrees. These pads bite about like OEM at 50 degrees and improve substantially as they warm up. Their operating range is listed to be 100 to 1200F. It doesn't take much to get them to 100 it seems. Their street performance should be fine as long as you don't live in an extremely cold climate.
They are getting louder as they wear in. I'm not terribly pleased about that.
It is too soon to tell if they are as loud as HP Plus.
HP Plus were actually fairly quiet until I took them to the track and cooked them. They were very quiet while they wore in to mate with the rotor surfaces. They started to squeal slightly after I bedded them in. Once they had been on the track, they started to howl terribly. I figured I had just burned up all the grease, and cleaned and greased them as part of my post track day routine. Nope. They howled like crazy the rest of that season. It was annoying and embarrassing.
These are acting about the same so far. As I alluded to before, the real test will come once they have been on the track. If the noise stays about the same or only gets a little worse, I will call them keepers.
I do not currently run staggered pads. There is not much benefit to doing that on the tracks I frequent.
I had my first track day with these pads yesterday. Things went pretty well. The temperature started out on the cold side at a balmy 29 degrees, so I ran my lowest temperature tires, which are Potenza RE11s, and are certainly not ideal for such a day.
During the first session, it took me about 4 miles to warm up the brakes. Once they were hot, initial bite was too much, as I went into ABS immediately in every corner and had to fight hard for any semblance of threshold braking. I'm sure the conditions account for all of this considering the cold summer tires and cold sealed asphalt.
As things warmed up outside, things got better. They started to behave something like HP+, but with more civil initial bite, better midrange torque characteristics, and better resistance to fade. The high temperature was 54 at about 3PM, and I was able to drive to about 80% of my normal capability during that session. That is where the problem arose, and it is the same problem I encountered with HP+. I began to feel fade about 12 minutes into the session. Here is where they are better than HP+: I was able to take 1 cool-down lap and re-engage. They lasted another 8 minutes before they started to fade again--just in time for another cool-down lap at the end of the session.
I went into the pits and shot the temps of my rotors, calipers, and pads. The readings were not bad at all at about 360F-ish all around, which is lower than I expected. Obviously, the pads saw temps far higher than 360.
The good news is the pads lasted the rest of the day with a little care, where HP+ probably would not have. The fact that a cold front blew in (mid 40s) which caused us all to go back to taking it a little bit easier probably did not hurt, but I still maintain these pads are a step forward for Hawk in the hybrid area.
The drive home was loud. While not as bad as HP+, the car was back to sounding like a school bus and turning heads. I actually had people rolling down their windows to helpfully tell me I need a brake job.
This morning, I cleaned and greased all appropriate brake parts and bled the fluid (DOT4) per my usual post track day regimen. Then I went for a drive to see how the noise level of these pads compares to HP+ and what I might have gained in torque due to bleeding the fluid. The bleeding made no difference, which means the fade I kept feeling was definitely the pads; this is really just confirmation of what I already knew since you cannot recover from boiled fluid. In terms of noise, they went back to about the same level of squeal that they had before tracking them. There is some squeal as the MPH approach zero, but it is manageable and not terribly annoying. Definitely quieter than HP+. I consider that a win.
I reached 3 conclusions as a result of this trial:
1. I have advanced far enough that I need true track pads and hybrids will not work for me long-term.
2. Hawk DTC-30 Street/Race pads offer definite improvement over HP+.
3. These pads are great candidates for serious AutoX use and novice to intermediate road course drivers.
Here is the amount of dust after 115 miles on the track and 138 miles there and back (it seems to blow off easily at high speeds):
[EDIT for clarification]
Let me clarify one thing. These pads did not fade badly. I backed off of them when I first started to feel fade to test them vs. the fluid. They could have very well held up the rest of the day going ***** to the walls. I intend to test that next month.
Last edited by Steve Dallas; 03-13-2015 at 09:08 PM.
If you want to run track and not have street issues then you need two sets of rotors & pads to swap back & forth with. Otherwise there is no having your cake & eating it too ....
10-13-2014, 10:50 AM
