Owner reviews for brake pads

The best solution I have found is to use slotted rotors--cryo treatment typically gets me 10K more miles before hard spots develop and I get a pedal vibration--and an aggressive pad without any ceramics. My solution is to use the best quality slotted rotor I can find, cryo treatment preferred, and use either a Wilwood BP-10/20 pad or a Project Mu NS brake pad. I found those two pads were aggressive enough to have great stopping power and would wear out the rotor at the same rate the pad wore down.

Powerstop Evolution from rockauto.com. As quiet and dust-free as OEM, but with a bit more stopping power. They’re also much cheaper than OEM.

Mine were equally grooved, if not more so. The stock pads have a high metal content and this eats away at the rotors. I recently changed my front rotors and pads for Stoptech Slotted + EBC red ceramic pads. Rotors are noticeably higher quality, and the pads are pretty good as well, though they dust considerably more than my stock ones did.

Also, brakes are really good. They dust like hell, but stop the car well and feel good doing it. Confidence inspiring.

When I had my mini cooper, I ran the 1521s on stock rotors and never had any issue in the rain.

I have StopTech pads and rotors on my car and have not had any issues.

If you get a mk7, get the lighting and performance pack. The headlight performance is astonishing. The performance pack brakes are amazing not to mention how sweet the diff is on a back road.

EBC pads come with special brake-in layer to deglaze rotors. And this is what they recommend (came with pads): I have them on my Tig. Excellent low dust, high performance pads.

I've run the Akebono ceramics on a few cars. They don't have a great initial bite but they do have good stopping power in most conditions. My only note against them is that it can get scary with heavy braking while driving long distances on the highway in sub-40 degree rain - I've had multiple times in two different cars where there's a solid 2 second delay between pressing the pedal hard and them actually biting in those conditions.

I have their brake pads and I dislike them, the brake dust that comes off is almost 10x the amount of the oem ones