EBC SR11 Brake Pad Review
The EBC SR series brake pads are a a relatively new brake pad to the "race" scene as of 2022 or so. When I first heard about these, they weren't really discussed in many articles and barely discussed even by EBC in press releases. The few shops that could "get" them were hiding the part numbers for whatever reason as well. I was able to dig up the information though through various forum posts, and then by working with the folks over at KNS Brakes get my hands on a set of the pads.
The thing I loved the most about these pads was their heat resistance and total lack of fade, exceptional bite and feel, low dusting, and incredibly low wear characteristics both on themselves and the rotors. I'll write about that all below in great length!
My overall opinion on these pads is: They are the best pad I've ever driven for durability, wear, low dusting and overall braking feel/power.
I personally got a pair at the start of the 2024 season, and then proceeded to run them for the entirety of the 2024 season for 15 events, including 5 time attack events. One event I had a co-driver and we would run the car back to back for the entire day, ensuring the car got two events worth of time and a TON of heat! When I removed these pads, I noticed some pad tapering, which I'll discuss later below, but I believe with proper pad rotation it's not unlikely that I could be getting as many as 18 events out of a set of these front pads!
Rotor Wear
At one point I was starting to get concerned that small cracks were forming on my rotors, but this was not the case. The rotors continue to look like this and remain crack free at this point in time. I an these rotors through a set of Carbotech XP-10s and now a set of EBC-SR11's, and they seem to be wearing minimally and have notable life left in them!
A note on Pad Wear and potentially needing to rotate pads
So I will openly admit that towards the end of the 2024 season, the brakes started to feel less grabby and heat resistance dropped. I attributed this to the pads wearing out, but as they still functioned and visibly seemed to have plenty of pad material where I could see the pad, I assumed they were just getting worn out.
Turns out, this was not the case, and what was actually happening was the pads were developing a significant amount of taper. Per some research with EBC in an article they wrote and KNS via email, this was likely because the Cadillac Brembo 4 piston calipers I am using all have the same size piston, and thus the piston pressure is greater closer to the top than the bottom of my caliper, resulting in additional wear.
The easy solution to resolve this should be to just rotate the pads on my caliper every event or two to help ensure even wear. Not exaclty a huge lift by any means as I would just need to hammer out the pin, swap pads, hammer em back in, presto-send-o I'm back at it!
It's worth noting as well that the pad wear is significant on one side, but rather minor on the other for both pads. This leads me to believe that had I rotated the pads better I could easily have gotten much more pad life out of them, which really speaks to how well they wear!
I believe it is also worth noting that while this pad wear is unique in my experimentation thus far to the EBC pads, the extreme wear charactiristcs of the pad are also unique, with them easily lasting 2x as long as any other pad. It is entirely possible the other pads would have started to show these sort of wear characteristics, were they capable of lasting this long!