It was time to do pads and rotors on my 2012 E63. As I started pricing OEM equipment, even from online sources, it quickly made sense to start looking at aftermarket alternatives. As I started pricing non OEM parts, it made more sense to look at some of the aftermarket performances parts available. That meant Racing Brake and Girodisc. I ended up with the Racing Brake package for all 4 corners that included full floating rotors, their street pads, stainless braided lines, and fluid for about the same price as the cheapest aftermarket OEM replacements. No brainer!

Fitment was fine and install went without any hiccups. I bedded them according to their website but full stopping power wasn’t achieved until the last bit of rotor surface was completely free of the coating and raw tooling/machined surfaces (about 2 days of random driving). I probably could have done some higher speed bedding but the brakes were still more than acceptable for that initial period. Once fully bedded the brakes proved better than OEM. Very slight increase of initial bite with slightly stronger, more linear stopping power. These are their street pads so I didn’t expect a big difference but I’d say braking was improved by about 15% of new OEM pads/rotors and probably a 30% improvement over OEM pads/rotors that are worn beyond 60%. I noticed that after my OEM brakes got down to the last half of their life, they lost a noticeable amount of performance. I’m hoping these won’t have that problem. The OEMs also tend to lose performance and slightly fade after multiple high speed uses but so far these are pretty fade free.

I researched beforehand and a few people said brake dust was about the same as OEM. This was a bit of a concern because brake dust on OEM pads/rotors is absolutely horrendous. I’m VERY glad to report that brake dust is minimal, better than the Akebono pads I ran on the E55s. One week worth of brake dust build up on the rims now is about equal to 1 hour on OEMs (not exaggerating). I am about to do a ceramic coat over the paint and was going to inquire about having my wheels done to decrease brake dust build up. I’m not even concerned anymore. The wheels now stay clean without touch-ups between weekly washes. Even if there wasn’t a performance improvement, this point alone is worth the purchase.

It’s only been a month but so far I’m completely satisfied.