After my first track day, it became pretty clear that I needed to improve my brakes. The pedal was going soft after a couple of sessions, and the pads were leaving deposits on the rotors, creating a grinding feel/sound. I already had a set of fresh rotors and Performance Friction (PFC) Z-rated pads, which are their performance/street pad. I had originally intended on using them on the M3, but these parts are better suited to a street car used for DE‘s.
I also added Speedbleeders to all the calipers to ease in bleeding the brakes. I’ve had these on all my cars and they are cheap insurance to keeping air out of the system, just a simple one way check valve. I flushed the system and filled with some ATE Super Blue, which has a higher boiling temperature than the OE fluid. UPDATE: After several track days, I’d recommend a fluid with better hot operating temps than the ATE Blue. I’ve been using the Brembo LCF with good results.
Finally I swapped the strut hats. This is a fairly well known trick with the M hats found on the E36/7/8 chassis (possibly others.) Basically it’s a free way to get about -2.5-3 degrees of camber on the front, helping to alleviate the stock setups tendency to understeer. After swapping hats (with the coilovers still mounted) I took the car for an alignment. I netted -3.1 degrees of front camber, while the rears were at close to -2. I still need to find a performance alignment shop to take care of the rear setup with the Ireland Engineering camber/toe adjusters. I also can probably take a little toe-in out of the front, but it was a huge improvement at the track.
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