Brakes!
First lets’s get this out of the way.:
“I’m dumb. But i’m good looking… so it evens out. ”
Did I need to purchase a complete set of front and rear rotor and pads? No.
Did I hate the rusty looking rotors and was there a slight ‘shimmy’ during highway braking to justify buying new…everything? Yes.
So, naturally, I reached out to the fine folks over at Nemesis Autosport for their advice. They suggested going with a set of EBC Yellows for the pads. After doing my obligatory due diligence on the pads and loving the fact that they require no ‘warm up’, substantially improves pedal feel and obviously out performs the OE pads…told the Nemesis folk to order a complete set!
Now for the rotors and this is where it hurt. The D4 S8 has a 15.6 inch two piece rotor. Which means it’s hilariously expensive. They are aftermarket options like Zimmermann and the lot but after a Googling for a few days, I stumbled upon SHW.
I’ll be honest, I never heard of the brand. But doing further research found out they have been doing brakes discs for decades for the automakers and helped Porsche design the first fully vented rotor! That was enough of a resume for me and I ordered a set asap!
A few days later, came both the pads and rotors. Since I hate rusty looking rotors, I grabbed some AMMO NYC Gelee Pro and coated the rotor hats. Why you ask? The ceramic coating will help repel any water buildup and as you know water + metal = rust
As you can see the coating helped give the rotor hat a beautiful deep black color as well! So after all of that got the brakes installed and read through the EBC instructions on bedding in the pads.
Now, the instructions are needlessly complicated. For anyone who has bedded in new pads before, it’s an easy process of a few 30-0 stops and letting the brakes cool, then that’s it. EBC, on the other hand, requires you to do 6 stops from around 80mph down to around 30mph. Until your pedal goes soft, then coast as long as you can and do it like two more times. This is AFTER driving around slowly for a week and/or 100 miles.
Welp, I tried doing all of that. Any for the first few weeks they worked great! Now, they’re squealing like a pig when coming to a stop. EBC recommends, doing a few ‘moderate stops’ to eliminate the squeal…haven’t had a chance to try that yet.
If that doesn’t work…i’ll be taking advantage of their return policy and swapping out for their ceramic options