EBC Bluestuff NDX Formula Racing Brake Pads

Posted by admin

August 14, 2009

The GTO in Australia is known of course as the Holden Commodore and this very quick version shown above run by Emotional Engineering in the British GT series ran EBC Bluestuff throughout the long 1 hour races in its season. It also performed excellently in the FIA GT World series in France.

For several years EBC Brakes has been developing its full race pads for cars called Bluestuff and after a few final modification in 2009 is preparing to release this material known as Formula NDX in fall/autumn 2009 for the 2010 season.

The NDX Formula is a harder and longer lasting pad than its stablemate the Yellowstuff compound and has been very succesfully run on heavier cars including the Holden(Vauxhall) Monaro which weighs in at over 3600 lbs ( almost 1.7 tons) and as such is a much better test of the typical “3000 pound” USA race cars.

Whilst EBC Brakes Yellowstuff has worked out very well in Europe on Trackday and short even closed circuit racing its high friction characteristics cause it to wear quite quickly on heavier cars and longer races, making the Blue NDX grade the ideal upgrade.

NDX Blue is an interlayer carbon deposit base material which means two things.

First the interlayer device which is a crumb particulate organic material is placed onto the backplate after the bonding glue is applied. The NDX compound is then poured into the molds on top of the interlayer and the pads are hot molded together at which time the interlayer and pad mix fuses together to form an extremely strong bond. This method of interlayer processing has produced pad shear strengths 3 to 5 times higher than direct bonded pads. There are other companies using bond enhancing methods such as the nucap plate system but EBC Brakes has chosen this organic method as it has several advantages. This also allows us to retain use of the super-strong new Dunlop adhesives we use which “Seal” the brake material better to the steel backplate preventing moisture ingress. Finally it provides a highly shock resistant layer between the pad material and backing plate and a tiny degree of flexibility which resists “Edge lifting” much better. This allows us to eliminate the need for chamfers which have the same effect in reducing edge lifting….chamfers are used on all standard production EBC Brakes.

USA Driver George Penn , long time EBC enthusiast, has been using EBC yellows and is now evaluating Bluestuff for us on the GTO.

Second benefit is minimised rotor/disc wear

Formula NDX reduces disc wear significantly due to the deposit system employed. Discs will last 2-3 times longer than racing with semi metallic pads according to our tests, one Team from Norway ran a whole 24 hours race on one set of pads and discs whereas with their previous choice of semi metallic pads they required a rotor change mid session.

Formula NDX pads are supplied

• Without shims as noise is not an issue
• Without chamfers as edge lifting solved with the interlayer
• Powder coated Blue for high corrosion resistance
• In a new carbon deposit material for superb performance and extremely low rotor/disc wear.

Carbon deposit materials have been around for a while and are a superb solution on track use. They normally require several laps of rotor/disc conditioning for the pad to lay down the micro thin glaze it requires on the rotor surface but not so with NDX. The new EBC Brakes NDX pads work right out of the box. Tests on several race cars have shown that provided the rotors are in decent condition and not hollowed, NDX works first lap and just gets better. In spite of this comfort zone drivers are always recommended to allow 2-3 laps to bed pads in, just good race procedure.

EBC Brakes Formula NDX will be available for all high end race and track car original equipment calipers and all popular Wilwood, AP, Stoptech Baer and Brembo aftermarket calipers from September 2009.

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