Thought I would share my experience with the ST43 brake pads on a stock '13 GS.

Cliffs Notes: Breaks are Noisy! Breaks stop car hard! Brakes do not fade! Brakes are good for the track, not so good for the street!

In June I did my first HPDE event at NJMP Lightning and had a blast. I was running stock suspension and brakes and never had any brake fade and the brakes felt very solid. Approaching turn 1 at 130 or so and hard on the brakes with ABS kicking in was predictable and the brake system did a great job. I never had any fade and the car settled in nicely, even when ABS was on.

In July I signed up for a two day NASA event at the same track and figured I would be on the safe side and install new pads and Motul brake fluid. After researching pads on this site and others I went with the ST43 padlets for the front and rear. I was aware of the possible noise issues, but was willing to deal with it for a good pad, and piece of mind.

So... this past Friday I changed the padlets and bled the brakes for the HPDE on Sat. and Sun. I get everything done around 6pm and decide to go find a place to bed the pads. I pull out of my driveway and it sounded like metal on metal every time I even thought about applying the brakes. The metallic squeal was insane! I turned around figuring I screwed something up, but an inspection of the breaks revealed nothing wrong. I decided to wait until dark (so nobody could see me) to try and bed the pads and hopefully quiet this thing down.

Around 9 I go out to the deserted roads in a non-populated area (along the way every dog within 1 mile of my car woke up and howled) and followed some instructions from the Stop Tech website. After the tenth hard stop the massive squeal actually turned into a very little squeal for about five minutes. The second the brakes cooled it sounded horrible. At this point I decide to stick with the ST43's and go to the track with them.

Event day... I woke everyone up from Central NJ to Southern NJ anytime I applied my brakes. I scared the crap out of dozens of people in cars and walking by if I had to get on the brakes a little hard, or if I was approaching a full stop. This things are obnoxious! I get to the gate to sign in and the guy comments that I have the noisiest brakes he has ever heard (yay, I'm special ). I pull into the pit area and everyone looks to see what the hell is making that horrible noise. All I'm thinking, and hoping, is that after a session or two these things will quiet down a bit.

First session of the day with an instructor behind the wheel was interesting. I told him all about the noise and warned him how loud it was. He had no idea. After two laps with him in the drivers seat we pitted and swapped seats. The guy in the pit road commented "those are the worst sounding breaks I have ever heard". First session I was taking it a bit easy on the breaks and trying to get accustomed to them, but they really felt good.

The rest of Sat. and all day Sun. gave me a real good feel for these breaks...

Noise - These are obnoxious! Anything other than hot is insane. I have a new nickname... Mr. Squeaky Brakes. Everywhere I went in the racetrack area people came up to me and asked me if I was the one with the noisy brakes. The good thing is... once these brakes get hot, they get really quiet. I would think a track with a lot of braking points, hard braking, heating up the pads due to the design of the track or long / extended periods would be ideal for these ST43's. Also, once hot even when not on the track they would stay quiet for a decent amount of time, but once cooled they are screamers. Even now, after abusing these pads all weekend, they are insanely loud.

Performance - This is an interesting point as these, in my opinion, are too much brake for the car. I have stock tires and these will pull down the car something fierce, as long as the ABS is not activated. I can easily stop quicker without ABS on these pads than stock pads with ABS activated. With the ST43 pads if I went into ABS the rear would almost try to spin around. From the drivers seat; without the ABS on the car goes in a straight line and is predictable, activate ABS with these pads and the front end gets very squirmy, and it wasn't the best confidence booster. I tried to stay out of ABS as much as possible, but when I did get into the ABS it was pretty much hanging on. What's also nice about these pads is the instant grip. Just touching the brake pedal you can feel the grip of these pads, it comes on right away and fairly strong. Heat is another area where these excel. Once hot they grip better than cold, and when they grip they grip. I thought it was funny because some guys in Mustangs were complaining about brake fade, I was almost complaining because the opposite was happening to me. As I put laps on the brakes, they actually stopped the car better... the anti-brake fade pads.

Wear - These things look new. 9 sessions this weekend and they look great, would never know they were stopping a car consistently from high speeds all weekend.

Price - Mediocre in my opinion. I bought these from LPI Racing (they were awesome to deal with) and they were around $500 with shipping. I think if these were quieter on the street, or when cold, these would actually be cheap. For a track only pad that I really don't want to drive on the street (and I mean that I just want to drive from my house to the track and back), these are a bit on the expensive side.

Dust - These dust like crazy . After this weekend my shiny new black Corvette is matte black on the sides. My gloss black rims are brown. In all honesty, the dust doesn't bother me as I knew this was going to happen when I bought a track pad.

All in all these are really great pads for the track, but the noise issue will have me looking for another pad. Performance is excellent on the track, but it took a lot to heat these puppies up, but once hot they really stopped the car. Hope this helps

 

Great pads make lots of noise and lots of dust. I suspect most of the dust was rotor dust not pad dust since they probably did a good job of machining your rotors. Make sure you don't let the dust get wet until you are going to wash the car and then do it someplace where you don't mind having a red stain. Once you wet the wheels make sure they are cleaned before going on to something else or you could rusty aluminum wheels.

You think the ST43 is a great pad wait until you have some sticky tires on the car and try some ST47s. If you keep on using street tires you may have better luck running ST43s in the front and ST41s in the rear. That will take away some of the rear brake bias.

Porterfield also sells the Raybestos pads for your car and it might be worthwhile to give them a call and talk to their engineer about combinations of the compounds.

Bill

 

Thanks Bill! I was wondering if I should have gone with a different compound on the rear to help correct the bias. I will definitely check into that.

 

Great write up moose. I am installing the Raybestos ST 43 pads on all 4s on my GS along with a flush and fill of Motul 600. Question..

Could you, or anyone else, explain the ABS issue? Once ABS activates you let up on the brakes and ABS imediately de-activates yes? The part were your rear got squirrely has me concerned a little..

Also, how many hard braking slowdowns and what speeds were involved when you bedded these ST 43s? Thanks

 

Wow...I had no idea that brake pads could cost $500

 

....and that's on the cheap side with GS or Z06 calipers. I prefer CarboTech and a full set (F / R) is ~$600. I haven't looked lately but it used to be that spending several thousand on a big brake kit could pay for itself just in the savings associated with the pads if you do enough track days. Recovering the cost was even faster by selling the OEM setup.