Are Pagid brake discs any good, for sporty normal driving and for the odd track days?
ECP has a Brake Sale on now and front discs for my Sport are only £28 each, and it Would be nice to change them just to get rid of a slight judder.
The rears are £16 each which also sounds pretty good, but I don’t really know what the normal rate is for discs. ECP states that the discount is around 30% from their normal prices, 50% from RRP.
A full set of Pagid front pads for a sport is £22, 30% of list, 75% of RRP (I guess no-one ever buys at RRP ).
Yes top quality and oe on many cars. Fitted them myself all round on our Passat a few years ago and was well pleased with the job.
Prices look good, you might get cheaper ringing around, but they will be very good on the road ime. Get Ceratec and red rubber grease too and be especially careful to scrape all the crud from the hubs before fitting the new discs to avoid runout problems
Pagid has a good reputation for brakes, however like all brands they have a range of products on differeing qualities and like all brands, just because the box says Pagid does not mean it comes from the main Pagid factory. .
I have got to say that at those prices you are very much in the budget end. In particular I would urge caution if you are expecting to go on track with a set of front pads costing £22. At 30% reduction that would still have only put them in the £30 bracket, the type of pads Pagid made their reputation with I would be expecting you to be paying £130 even after the 30% discount.
My contact at ECP says Pagid aren’t what they used to be. He recommended Textar for the same price, and I was very happy with them on my old BMW. Not sure if they do them for an MX-5.
I wouldn’t recommend the EBC Turbo Groove discs. The gold galvanising is superficial, so they go all rusty (unlike the Textars, which stayed new looking through winter) and the grooves make an irritating swishing noise when you’re driving with the roof down. They stop the car fine, but no better than anything else.
To add a bit more yes I’d certainly take Nick’s advice if most of the driving will be on the track and perhaps a different set of front pads for those days would be the way to go.
For the road the mx brakes are already good so getting them up to standard spec using decent pads and discs from one of the bigger makers will be good for most usual road conditions.
I used to work in the parts trade selling Ferodo Don Mintex etc for 15 years and everyone had their own favourites. Back then they were all separate companies and most did competition frictions but they were hard work on the road. Some of the newer stuff may be better. Product has almost always been shifted around/bought in to keep a full catalogue. Use a known brand on the road and you should be ok as they are quite tightly controlled to make them under R90 to original spec.
£22 is about the going rate trade for oe spec front pads. I just looked at a recent bill for ours and the Mazda 6 were £22 and the MX5 Mk3 were £21. Rear discs for both (both cars use the same rear discs) were £13 each so a no-brainer to swap those out. Both done over a year ago and both great on the road. It’s worth getting the fitting kits of new springs and clips too and really going to town on cleaning and lubing properly.
The other thing to bear in mind is many of these companies have now merged anyway and you’ll never know what or where the stuff has come from. Regarding Textar and Pagid they are both owned by TMD these days along with Mintex and Don. Just don’t buy cheap non branded or from an outlet without a proper supply chain that may have bought in fake parts.
As far as I’m concerned Apple is in complete control of it’s products and take complete ownership from one end to the other. Of course it is made in someone else factory but nailed down to fractions of mm’s exactly to how Apple designed them and then tested and perfected by Apple until it’s released. Indeed, Apple has often invested in the factories/manufacturers themselves and helped develop new manufacturing techniques that otherwise wouldn’t have existed or wouldn’t be in wide spread use, like ARM, Gorilla glass, aluminium chassis and so on.
That is as opposed to some other brands where the whole product is sometimes designed by someone else, perhaps loosely to their specification, and then they slap their brand on it. They have then out-sourced not only the manufacturing but also the design and specification, and some times also quality control and testing. When you come running with some problem you will be fobbed off, they don’t want to know.
Is Apple fault-less? Of course not!!
Anyway, I won’t be making any more comments on this as I Know how it can easily end up
