Here is the latest report from the testing I have been doing on the new EBC pads. I received a new set of ceramic reds for the front and rear of my STi to try using as a road pad only. I had a trip coming up to the Catalunya rally so it was an ideal opportunity to see how these would cope both in the UK as a daily pad, plus also I would have the opportunity to try these in some very severe conditions driving over the Pyrenees into Spain.
I have now covered 6500 miles on these pads, 3200 of that was on my trip to the Catalunya rally. To get down to Lloret I drove via the motorways of the UK, France and Spain and avoided the severe mountain roads and the pads worked as expected with good bite from cold and were always ready for use even if they weren’t aplied for a very long time.
Once down in Lloret, the driving was to say the least “spirited” with us covering aprox 1000 miles in the week driving the rally stages multiple times. I covered a lot more stage miles than the rally competitors. The first real test was when we drove the shakedown stage, at the end of this I had pushed the brakes so hard that the paint used to give them their red colour was smoking severely, yet the brakes hadn’t shown any signs of fade and the feel was consistent throughout. The other good thing was the brake pedal hadn’t shown any signs of extra travel, so the heat wasn’t getting through the pad material and into the fluid at any level.
We then spent the week out on the stages, driving through the mountain passes or just cruising early morning to the stages to spectate, during all this driving the brakes performed faultlessly. Driving home, I decided to take a trip across the Pyrenees via the N152, one of the most challenging roads in Europe for brakes and handling, it’s hard to describe quite how busy you are, but you are on the brakes every few seconds as you enter the next switchback, it’s non stop flat out driving for around an hour without any letup. Again absolutely no problems at all, and this is with a fully loaded up car being driven rapidly. If the brakes can survive this road they will survive anything the UK can throw at them.
Since returning I have just used these with my day to day driving with a fairly even match of normal road and motorway driving. Dust wise these do produce more than the EBC Greens, and it helps if you keep on top of the wheels every week, but they are producing a lot less dust than the Mintex I normally used would have, and certainly kept the wheels cleaner than those on the other cars down in Catalunya running Mintex.
So how have these pads survived? They started out with 12.5mm thickness. They are now between 8mm and 9mm in thickness, the thinner pad being the hotter running pad. They have 0.5mm taper wear from leading to trailing edge, which is normal behaviour. The pad material is still intact and there are no signs at all of the friction material breaking away from the backing plate. In other words they are perfectly capable of doing plenty more work without any loss in performance, I am impressed. Disk wear wise, there is a slight amount of wear, around 1mm, this wear is from all the testing I have done on track and road, so well within normal wear rates for AP Disks, they aren’t eating the disks, just behaving as expected.
Some pictures of the pads are attached again; the thick pad is a new Racing yellow I am now trying that is the same thickness as the reds when new. The top/bottom pad shows how the heat has burned some of the paint, yet the brake pad material is stable.
I have also been doing some testing with the softer compound Race yellow 1605 pads; I covered 140 miles on track at Oulton Park last weekend in the wet. These worked much better than the previous Yellows I tried and took just a few laps to bed in properly. They felt very similar to the reds on track, with similar levels of feel, they were consistent and didn’t suffer any fade, they also didn’t suffer from any sensation of crumbling, so are slightly more stable than the reds as a track pad I would say. Wear rates are good, again starting with 12.5mm thickness, after 140 miles on track they now measure 11mm. There are no signs of heat getting to the backing plates at all, so they seem to have slightly better heat insulating properties compared to the reds, although the wet weather may have helped in cooling these. The pads have now gone back to EBC for analysis in their test labs and they have given me some more to try to do further testing.
I am more than happy to keep using these new materials and would say they are definitely worth trying if you are looking to change. Hopefully you find this information useful.