Brakes are the opposite of tires. Tires you baby, brakes you give as much time to cool as possible - which means using them hard.

Did you brake hard and short? If you're ever braking and not using them 100%, that's going to overheat them in a hurry. Find your marker, get on them HARD, and hold them at the threshold (or on the floor, with ABS) and then roll off quickly but smoothly before turn-in.

Here's a question: do you have ABS? Did it come on? If you do, and it didn't come on in every corner, you were not braking hard enough.

Also, Bendix pads are not good for high-temp work. How many laps did you do? Did you let off the throttle or hold it all the way to the braking zone? You've got to baby your brakes on track. My Miata is probably the cheapest car available that comes with brakes deemed worthy for track useage - they're the same size as those on my overweight, front-heavy pig of a Contour. Without at least pads, and probably rotor upgrades, Contours need to run short sessions and be watched carefully. Your car may stop with the Bendix pads being piles of molten goop on the backing plates, but it's going to eat through them ina hurry.


-Philip Maynard '95 Contour [71 STS | Track Whore] '97 Miata [71 ES | Boulevard Pimp] 2006 autocross results