There have been a lot of reports of excessive front pad wear at trackdays, so I'm trying to build up a database of wear rates for both standard and specialist pads. It is difficult to be objective because some people use their brakes harder than others, but some interesting statistics might emerge.

A lot of people have reported high wear rates with EBC Greens, which is to be expected because they are rated as medium to high wear by the manufacturers, but they are very good while they last. Two of us fitted EBC Turbo-grooved discs with Red pads (high performance racing pads) and had major problems. Despite about 1000 miles of gentle road use to bed them in, mine totally expired half way through the 4th session when braking from about 95 at the end of Starkeys straight on Monday at Donington, resulting in a trip across the grass and kitty litter at about 60mph.

Someone else's set lasted one session more, and he was down to bare metal as well. Fortunately, I had a spare set of part-worn pads with me, so these were fitted during the lunch break, and lasted for the rest of the afternoon. I used to get a couple of trackdays use out of a set of 'Greens', but there seems to possibly be a manufacturing defect with the 'Reds' which in my case, only lasted about 80 miles of track use.

The remains of the pads have been sent back to the factory for analysis, and I'll pass on details when I get them. I would be grateful for reports on the performance and life of different makes of pads, and hopefully we'll be able to come up with a recommendation that combines good performance with acceptable life.

Email Richard at rw.foster@btinternet.com(9/01)