Track Pad recommendations
Since it's on ongoing question with new school participants, and products and technology are constantly changing, I thought it might be good to get direct experiences with the different track pads people have tried.
Direct experience only please, there's plenty of hearsay on the Internet already.
Comments on stopping power, temperature resistance, pad/rotor wear, and dust problems would be a great place to start. why dust? keep reading.
I've used a few:
Stock pads: Worked fine for C group experience, but easily overheated once I had a few schools. Pad consumption is very high when tortured at a driver's school. Of course, easy on rotors, lotsa easily cleaned dust.
Cool Willy's: Excellent for C/B/A transition, easy on rotors and friendly gray dust. Good stopping power when hot, but showed temperature failure as I got faster in A group, edges of the pad started to crumble, vertical cracks in the pad material.
PF 90: my favorite track pad, characteristics similar to cool willies but withstood more heat. I rarely overheated them. Excellent stopping power and temperature resistance, rotor friendly, lotsa easily cleaned dust. Now NLA, thanks Performance Friction.
PF 97: recommended by PF to supersede the 90's. Excellent hot stopping power and temperature resistance. rotor wear seems moderate WHEN HOT on the track. When cold, driving to/from the track, rotor wear is severe, you can hear them grinding away. I'm told this is the nature of the pad material. Dust from these is a nightmare. They produce a dark dust that seems benign enough till it gets wet, then it hardens into a Portland cement like mixture that is unremoveable my any means known to man. So of course it rained sometime during almost every track weekend I've used them. The finish came off my wheels before this stuff came off.
So now I'm looking for a high-temp track pad that won't eat my rotors or destroy my wheels. Any suggestions?
I'm wondering about
Hawk HP-10
Carbotech XP9, XP10, XP11, XP12, XP?
Pagid Yellow Endurance
Performance Friction compounds other that 97
feel free to comment about any direct experience you've had with track brake pads.
Thanks very much.
- Joel B.
Track pad recommendations - HT-10s
Myself, and many others, have had the same experience with HT-10s. They are quite non-linear in their generated braking force. You come up to a corner and trounce on them, and there's some braking, but then after about 1 second - yowee - you're parked!
Since the ultimate braking force is more than I've experienced with any pad, I kind of liked them for open-track days - you could time the braking quite well. But once I started racing, they were a disaster - try a dive-bomb move on the inside of someone going into a corner - apply brakes late........ then, suddenly you're BEHIND the car you're trying to pass - much more difficult to master.
I now use Hawk Blues for racing, but they are rotor eaters when driven cold (like on the street, or in the rain on the track) and shed rust-making dust that has to be washed off immediately. Otherwise, they're great.
I've heard great things about Pagid Orange, but they don't make a pad to fit my AP brakes.
Joe