swoope

iTrader: (5)

to the op and the rest in this thread..

my little bit of info for you..

axxis ultimites do very well but the rears dust like a whole lot.. just in street driving..

did fine on track.. with fresh fluid, and hpde1 or 2.

same thing with the hawk ceramics. but they dust way less front and rear. i think they are fine for hpde 1 or 2..

but i note. they will not stand up to an instructor that runs tt...

i had one drive my car with me in it and he glazed the pads. but wow what he could do with my car.. fixing glazed pads is easy..

beers

SiLVeRE8

iTrader: (8)

i have the hawk hps and i am quite disappointed in them because they seem the same as oem and they seem to produce a whole lot of brake dust. i think i would stick with oem for my next set of brake pads instead.

darnellm

iTrader: (1)

+1 Mazdaspeed pads
similiar to OEM with longer life

justjim

I'm relatively new to the RX8, I have 2 track sessions in the advanced group at Sebring with my new RX8, but I have quite a bit of street and track experience dealing with high performance braking issues with my former car, which was a FWD Acura RSX Type S. My first comment is that relatively speaking the RX8 brakes are superb right out of the box. I seriously doubt that most people will overdrive the OEM brakes on the street.

That said, if you really want to stop faster, buy stickier/larger tires. The OEM brakes are fully capable of setting off the ABS at any speed you would safely encounter on the street. As a result, the limiting factor is not braking efficiency but tire traction.

If you do overdrive the OEM brakes because you have humongous tires and you drive like a lunatic, I would suggest Axxis Ultimates, as they have the best coefficient of friction and heat range for a street performance pad per dollar. If money is no object, try Carbotech Bobcats or Cobalt GT Sports. Any street performance pad is going to dust more than the OEM pads, get used to it.

If you track the RX8 more than once, you should be using dedicated track pads such as Carbotech XP10/XP8s or Cobalt XR2/XR5s. If I was going to spend money to upgrade the brakes for the track I would get a 2-piece floating hat front rotor. An interim lower cost upgrade would be to get a set of curved vane 1-piece rotors. But I had no issues whatsoever with track pads on OEM brakes and R-compound tires on the very brake intensive Sebring road course.

Spend your money elsewhere.

Kadavr

Recently went with these, so far my impressions are fairly good with them, although I haven't done any extreme braking with these (have winter tires on now) they seem to have a bit less initial bite than the oem and are more progressive, but the stopping power seems to be slightly better (they probably work better under constant hard breaking too). The only complaint is that they are pretty noisy when wet or cold, but once they worm up that disappears, ohh and also pricey (but again so are the oem pads).