I guess it depends where you live as well- it might not make sense if you live in an area with flat straight roads if you are never or rarely exercising the brakes and are very fixated on that extra few hundred dollars once every few years, that's all well and good. Others (like myself) who live in an area littered with tight twisty mountain roads will use the brakes a lot even just cruising. "Spirited" drives can and will absolutely work the brakes to a point of needing a heat tolerance beyond your basic rock auto street special.

Heat tolerance aside some people are just fine with spending some more money for a pad with higher friction, better feel and/or less dust than the OE pads for purely street use, particularly on their higher end luxury performance car. Again, it's all about how you use the car and what you prioritize. I usually do 20+ track events each year and am constantly testing/using various track compounds to pair my own subjective feedback along with objective data to our customers. I've just gotten used to higher friction pads with better feel and feedback and so even on my daily street cars I'll always opt for something better because I simply can't stand the lack of response, feel, linearity of friction etc. from most normal cheap street pads when I live in an area where I use the brakes so frequently. Yes, they stop the car in the same distance for a panic stop or two but I enjoy driving and in my opinion they detract from the overall experience so I'll always just pay the relatively small premium to be happy with the brakes.

-Matt M.

 

Would the GG rated Brembos suffice in your opinion? I’ll find out for myself next week when I slap them on but wanted to know if you had any insights to the pads I bought.

 

They only way to find out is, when you try your brembo and liked it then its a score...if not, then you know that you wouldn't be buying that for next time. i suggest enjoy what you have right now...

 

Ill definitely do a a review and drive it under stop and go, highway, and canyon driving as well. Now am I going to go ballistic initial D driving? No. But I’ll make a fun jaunt up and down our many Malibu hills roads and get them warm.

by the way how fast have you gone on Big Willow?

 

i dont quite remember, coming out of turn 9 on the straight away, maybe 120 +...its a very high speed track. Im going to autoclub speedway on aug.

 

Liter bikes were hitting 155 on that straight back in '91. Pretty sure you're going at least that fast off of 9.

 

nope, not on turn 9, on the straightaway... turn is 9 pretty wide and scary...i already spun around on turn 4, so i would like to get home with my car in one piece...lol

this is the clip of my run. first time there at the track... by looking at the list on big willow, im on the list between honda civic hybrid and prius hybrid..lol..

https://fastestlaps.com/tracks/willow-springs

 

GG is more of a friction rating than a temperature rating. I've not used those specific pads but they do look to be much better than any other compound I've seen in or around that price range.

-Matt M.

 

The first G is cold. The second G is at a higher temperature. GG is pretty impressive for any street pad. Few deliver this performance. Still doesn't mean I will like it, but it's not bad for starters.

 

It's definitely a good indication that it's a more performance oriented friction material. However, to play devils advocate the high temp friction rating is measured at only 600*F/315*C which is what the pads would see in single panic stop situation from highway speeds since thats all a street pad needs to be rated for.

Not to go too far down the rabbit hole but or be overly critical but in order to attain a GG rating friction can't drop more than 22% from 250*F-600*F. I say it's more of a friction rating than a temp rating because, for example, a pad that drops 21% indicating pretty severe pad fade at less than 600*F would still earn a GG rating. To make things slightly more convoluted to my knowledge it's an honor system for manufactures to do their own testing and present their own data for a rating (similar to tires and their UTQG rating which are literally meaningless these days). I may seem overly pessimistic about manufacturer's "data" but I see huge companies like HAWK (and plenty of others) publishing laughable numbers because it sells more brake pads. HAWK's DTC-70 compound for example is rated by them to generate a peak of .86 Mu from ~1,000-1,400*F which if true would be at the extreme upper end of what a modern F1 car could handle and absolutely undrivable on any street car with boosted brakes regardless of how much aero or what tires it was using. Point blank it's just untrue. That's not to say these Brembo street pads aren't truly good pads for how you intend on using them but I do think the rating on these or any other pad should be taken with at least a small grain of salt.

At some point in the future if we can scale a bit more I'd love to have access to an in house brake dyno to cut through all of the BS and compare different compounds on the same dyno using the same parameters in order to reduce variables as much as possible. We'd be able to get truly apples to apples comparisons between different compounds.

-Matt M.

 

Pretty stupid question here, but aren't the OEM pads rated FF?

 

There were two different versions of the OEM pad but I'm not exactly sure what each were rated.

-Matt M.

 

Yes, the original Jurid pads are FF for sure.

And yes to everything Matt said about the ratings. No one uses them as a reliable source of information for anything other than street duty, and the windows for performance are pretty wide, so, as I said before, GG isn't bad, but it doesn't mean I will like them for sure at all. I would truly hope Brembo wouldn't be fudging their ratings given they know full well the original pads are all FF. At their price point, equal to OEM would be just fine too.

 

2 different versions? I know that there are the F Sport pads and the original RC F pads... The OEM pad looks to be a FF rating... I also thought the OEM pads were Brembo pads. I guess Jurid could be the original producer though


EDIT: Wait... do you mean the front vs rear pads?

 

Yeah, I meant down the straight out of 9. The key to speed there is using all the track in 9 to carry as much speed as possible onto the straight. A very fast friend of mine once told me he followed Scott Gray when Scotty held the motorcycle lap record there and realized what a pu*** he had been by not using the last 3 inches of asphalt exiting 9.