Brakes Upgrades

Miata MX-5 NC brakes

After 20,000 km my front stock brake pads are almost worned out.

Although stock brakes are very good - i thought "why not to improve them"?

After hearing a lot of opinions i decided on HAWK HP Plus pads - which are supposed to give somewhat better braking.

The downsides of better pads are always bad cold braking, increased dusting and squeaking.

HP Plus are seems to be not too bad with above cons.

Price is just a little bit more expensive than stock pads.

HAWKs come without those thin metal plates.

At rear end stock plates were transferred to the new pads.

At the front it didn't work out - the plates didn't hold good in place.

HAWKs don't have at all "wear allert" plates - those produce this scratching sound when pads are close to be weared out.

I guess i will have to keep an eye on them ;-)

Nice thing that HAWKs come with high temo grease:

This grease should be put on the back side of the pads in order to reduce squeaking.

Front rotors had little groves - and i decided to resurface them.

Rotors are out:

They came back shiny new - yehaaaa :-)

Rear rotors were still almost mirror smooth - so they were just sended a little bit to remove old pad material residuals:

Brakes performance

Immidiately after installation it's very bad - but this is normal when you put new kind of pads and/or new rotors.

So I followed a bedding procedure:

1. Few NOT very hard brakings from 60 km/h to 20 km/h (to warm up the brakes)

2. Few very hard brakings from 80-100 km/h to 20 km/h (to put a layer of new pads material on the rotors)

Now brakes feels very good - powerfull, good stopping, no unnecessary ABS activation.

After 50 km of driving it's still hard to stay wether stoping power is improved.

But what is already better - modulation ability.

This means that now there is more feel to the pedal (as opposed to more ON/Off kind of feeling) - this is very important as it allows more precise and linear braking.

A followup conclusions:

1. No fading at all - great !!!

2. Bite is about the same as stock pads.

3. Stopping power is better.

I felt big difference during first few days. After that i got used to it and feels like the same as before. We get use to good things very quickly :-)

4. Ability to modulate braking is way better - this is just fantastic.

5. Squealing - they do squeal sometimes. Mostly during light slow speed braking.

It doesn't happen every time. I still haven't decoded the pattern.

Anyway it's not at a level that bothers me.

6. Dusting - so far it looks similar to stock.

In short - since those costs about the same as stock pads and do work better - i don't see any reason not to go for them.

No more stock pads for me............

More followup conclusions:

1. HP+ dust a lot

2. They squeal like crazy - very embarrassing in town

3. Under heavy load they fade completey. And i mean "completely". Really scary stuff. This happened to me after every downhill run.

Final conclusion - for heavy loads i would look for another pad