Yup! That is why a lot of GT3 owners w/ PCCB who track their cars went with steel rotors and stow their ceramic rotors away till resale of the car.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jphughan
From what I gather reading about Porsche's carbon ceramics in their forums, evidently the rotors can go up to 100K+ miles without replacement under street and light track use, and the pads can generally go 60K. The problem is that under track use it's really easy to damage carbon ceramics either with heavy use (especially without a proper warmup) or by going off-track and having a piece of debris nick the rotors, which immediately kills them. You also have to be super careful removing wheels, because that too can nick rotors and require them to need replacement immediately.
If you DO need to replace a rotor, they're about $4K EACH on the Porsche side!  Oh, and in order to reduce the risk of premature damage/wear on your rotors, you're supposed to replace your pads at 50% life. So the general wisdom is apparently that the extra cost is totally ridiculous for track people between the damage risk and just general wear (lots of track people apparently end up switching back to steel), and on the street the added performance isn't worth the price because you don't need that much braking power and the steel ones are really good anyway. Which means....carbon ceramics aren't really worth it anywhere.  The only real benefit most owners seem to enjoy is practically zero brake dust, but that's a huge price to pay for that minor convenience.
Incidentally, a $4K per rotor cost makes me wonder how the carbon ceramic option is "only" $8K when ordering. That's a marginal cost increase of just $2K per wheel over steel brakes, but carbon ceramic rotors and pads cost well over $2K more per wheel to replace compared to their steel counterparts. I'm sure the factory gets a discount, but wow! Either the factory is getting a huge discount when fitting these to new cars and/or ordering the parts individually comes with an enormous markup! |