Racing Brake pads?

Is there a source for racing brake pads for Normal production calipers?  
     I have stock 4 piston Calipers  on my Jaguar  but to my knowledge no one makes a real racing pad for them.  Even in England where they are commonly raced, serious racers go aftermarket calipers.  
     I will take the weight hit  and use Wilwoods if I've  no other choice.   
  Realize my favorite track has 3 really long straights with tight 90+ corners.stopping a 3000 pound car from 160mph.   And a total of 14 corners in 4 miles to cook things.  
    There will be all the air I can duct,  the Best brake fluid available. 
  

A lot of brake manufacturers can do a custom application if you can provide the backing plates. It's worth calling Porterfield/Carbotech/Hawk and speaking to them.

Porterfield brakes will make you the pads you need. They will even recommend a compound for the track you'll be racing at. I told them which track we were racing at and they said Raybestos ST-43 pads. We won the LeMons endurance race at Eagles Canyon Raceway(old configuration) with those pads. After racing 10 hours Saturday, that evening everyone was working on their brakes that except us. We bled the fluid, raced the next day on to the win.

You can speed the process and maybe make it cheaper if you have old pads that you can strip of the old pad material and clean up to send them. That means they don't have to create the plates from scratch and can just bond whatever material you select onto them.

Sadly, I didn't have that option as I was for the most part running a caliper/pad you are very familiar with on my MGA Twin Cam - same as the Dunlop Jag calipers with no backing plate at all (S702 IIRC).  You need to find someone that has extra thick pucks of material or create a backer for them somehow.  I carefully kept a store of DS11 pads until they finally ran out and then found that Porterfield could do the thick material for me.

I really liked their R4 material, but ask them what they suggest for your car and use.

In reply to wspohn :

I too raced using the Ferodo DS11 pad. With great results. Pads lasted me at least a year and when I pulled them in the fall typically they were only 1/2 worn.  
  Never had a bit of fade with solid rotors and 1958 calipers.  This is at Elkhart lake with a 150+ mph car.  

In reply to frenchyd :

Porterfield will make what you need.

I gotta box of wilwood calipers. Think they're lighter than the stock calipers. Lmk 

In reply to yupididit :

I'm sure you are right. The stock calipers are Iron while Wilwood is aluminum.  Plus I'm absolutely sure  the Wilwood shed heat faster than the stock calipers.  
   The argument is the weight penalty you suffer.  

I assume we're talking about regulatory weight penalties, not engineering weight.

If you're not overheating brakes with solid rotors, I suspect you're leaving a lot of braking potential on the table. Or you have terrible tires :) That weight penalty may end up being quite worthwhile if it's the former. Less so if it's the latter. 

The nice thing about running Wilwoods in the US is that parts are everywhere and every brake pad manufacturer has pads on the shelf. 

frenchyd said:

In reply to wspohn :

I too raced using the Ferodo DS11 pad. With great results. Pads lasted me at least a year and when I pulled them in the fall typically they were only 1/2 worn.  
  Never had a bit of fade with solid rotors and 1958 calipers.  This is at Elkhart lake with a 150+ mph car.  

The only issue with DS11 was that they only worked when hot.  I always had to drag the brakes with y left foot on the pace lap (same brakes as a 150-S or early E type on y Twin Cam) and I would still frequently end up having to drift the first hairpin in a way one would prefer not to use (ass end out in the pea gravel) until they warmed up. 

When I switched to the R4 compound I found that they stopped just as well as the DS11 but also warmed up much more quickly. Should have switched sooner!

Keith Tanner said:

I assume we're talking about regulatory weight penalties, not engineering weight.

If you're not overheating brakes with solid rotors, I suspect you're leaving a lot of braking potential on the table. Or you have terrible tires :) That weight penalty may end up being quite worthwhile if it's the former. Less so if it's the latter. 

The nice thing about running Wilwoods in the US is that parts are everywhere and every brake pad manufacturer has pads on the shelf. 
Yes added weight because of regulations. Most group 6 racers use older calipers rather than suffer the added weight penalty. 

Vintage racing tires probably have a tread wear index of 900 ( only a modest exaggeration)  It doesn't matter because it's the same for everyone.  But yes I could lock up the tires at 150 or any speed.  In fact my brakes would out brake most cars including those with vented rotors. 
  I suspect much of the lack of fade came from the wire wheels. While air flow does remove some heat. Radiation removes more. If you notice modern racing wheels tend to be much more open than in the past. 

Tom1200 said:

In reply to frenchyd :

Porterfield will make what you need.

 

came here to say the same. Good peoples there.

frenchyd said:

Keith Tanner said:

I assume we're talking about regulatory weight penalties, not engineering weight.

If you're not overheating brakes with solid rotors, I suspect you're leaving a lot of braking potential on the table. Or you have terrible tires :) That weight penalty may end up being quite worthwhile if it's the former. Less so if it's the latter. 

The nice thing about running Wilwoods in the US is that parts are everywhere and every brake pad manufacturer has pads on the shelf. 
Yes added weight because of regulations. Most group 6 racers use older calipers rather than suffer the added weight penalty. 

Vintage racing tires probably have a tread wear index of 900. It doesn't matter because it's the same for everyone.  But yes I could lock up the tires at 150 or any speed.  In fact my brakes would out brake most cars including those with vented rotors. 
  I suspect much of the lack of fade came from the wire wheels. While air flow does remove some heat. Radiation removes more. If you notice modern racing wheels tend to be much more open than in the past. 

Locking up tires once isn't the same as being able to manage heat lap after lap. Single stop distances don't care if your rotors are vented or not. Super-hard tires definitely take the load off the brakes because you simply can't pump heat into them as quickly.

I'm pretty familiar with ducting and cooling brakes :) I think you may find that radiation and air flow are basically the same thing. But if you find that you can brake as hard as possible lap after lap without having to manage the brakes, there's no performance benefit in changing them because the brakes aren't your limiting factor.

In reply to Keith Tanner :

I  guess I'm poor at explaining that my Black Jack race car I raced for decades.  Is different than the XJS I'll be racing with. The Black Jack which had 1958 disk Brakes.  And I used Ferodo DS11 pads  to great effect.  Winning many major races or doing very competitively against famous professional racers like Sir Stirling Moss driving the factory Aston Martin DBR2