Carbone Lorraine RC5+ - Pictures & Review

[MJ23FE]

What's up duder's?

So in the search for the best pad that suites me and my driving style, I stumbled across Carbone Lorraine.

February 2009 I picked up the following parts which make up my current brake setup.

GiroDisc Magic Pads
GiroDisc Budget Rotors (blanks)
Techna-Fit Stainless Steel Brake Lines
Amsoil Series 600 DOT 4 Racing Brake Fluid (BF4)

After driving on this set up for about 6 months, I suffered from bad pad transfer (judder when braking which occurs from 85mph-60mph), crappy to no bite, crappy braking power overall, and tons fade when heated up just a little. My pedal feel was great, but my brakes absolutely weren't.
Yes, I've put up with it for this long. For the 95% of "spirited" daily driving that I do, I've learned to take it easy on the brakes and learned their limits and how to drive with them safely. It's time to change.

I want my brakes to chomp down and stop me in my place when I need to slam on them. Whether that be in creeping traffic, emergency highway maneuvers, spirited mountain drives, and everything in between. I wanted a pad that I could rely on to work without the worry of fade or destruction to my rotors. It seems the nature of a sintered pad is what I was looking for.

After doing a lot of reading and searching, I stumbled across this thread: http://forums.evolutionm.net/motor-s...pads-ever.html
I first caught wind of these pads over on EvoM in a very nice sticky. They intrigued me because they were considered a race pad, but also a street pad. With this, my investigation began and the reading commenced. Yeah, you might say, there's no way that a single pad can do it all. There are tons of companies out there that will advertise their pads to be great on the street while providing the temp range and bite needed on the track. Well, that's exactly what intrigued me about the RC5+. They are a race pad first, but are very well mannered on the street as well. They were engineered as the entry level or base track pad from CL, and were designed to provide as little dust and noise possible while also providing very good pad/rotor life. Obviously, our driving styles will effect the results we will see as with any pad.

Well, I read through the entire thread that I linked just above, and after being very impressed with the results that people had experienced, and the service provided by Jeff Ritter, I contacted Jeff over at Essex Parts Services with the more detailed questions that I had. After going back and forth a few times via e-mail, which by the way Jeff was very prompt in answering, I made the decision to go with the CL RC5+ brake pads. Jeff went above and beyond to help me with anything I needed and I would highly recommend doing business with him and EPS.

I contacted Mike over at Touge Factory before the New Year break, and he replied informing me that these were currently out of stock but would be back in on Monday. On Monday I contacted Mike via phone and spoke about the pads and what I was looking to get out of them and what I would be putting them through. I had all my questions answered, and he even informed me of a couple of guys that he knew running the RC5+ and the success they were having with them. They were back in stock at Essex as he said they would be, and after receiving his PayPal address, I proceeded to send him payment. I placed my order Monday, and they arrived at my apartment today, which is Wednesday. Mike at Touge Factory did a great job being extremely helpful and answering all my questions and I would highly recommend doing business with him and TF.

Now, I know I said I would review these pads, but it won't be for about a week until I get them installed on my car. Living in an apartment with a crappy parking lot and a lack of tools makes things difficult until I can get over to a friends place.

My setup at the time of the review will consist of:

Carbone Lorraine RC5+ Brake Pads
GiroDisc Budget Rotors
Techna-Fit Stainless Steel Brake Lines
Amsoil Series 600 DOT 4 Racing Brake Fluid (BF4)

The nature of these sintered race pads is that they are abrasive when they are cold. With that said, it was recommended to me by Jeff, and later Mike, that I take it easy during the first week of driving and basically baby the car. I was instructed not to heat them up and to keep them as cold as possible. This would allow for the pads to work their abrasion at low temps and basically scrub my rotors which are littered with pad transfer. My hope is that after at least a week of babying the car, my rotors will be nice and clean and I'll be good to go. If not, I'll be purchasing a set of Centric Premium front rotors from Touge Factory and will hopefully be good to go. I also plan on purchasing some ATE Super Blue brake fluid and bleeding my lines, but that won't be until after I get some results from these pads and determine how effective they are.

I took some photos of the CL RC5+ pads, and I must say, they are built great. The back plates are of awesome quality and almost look like brass. It's definitely a heavy duty product built to last. It puts the obviously cheaper GiroDisc Magic pads to shame.

I hope this encourages people to do business with 2 great vendors. As a consumer with no association with either company or individual, and with over a decade of working experience in customer service myself, I have complete confidence that both Jeff and Mike would take care of you.

Enjoy the photos.

-Jalal

Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM


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[Goat Blower]

Those are some mightly detailed pics of brake pads alright.

[MJ23FE]

Originally Posted by Goat Blower

Those are some mightly detailed pics of brake pads alright.

Haha. Thanks!

-Jalal

[Shane@DBPerformance]

Can we get more pics of the box they came in?

[MJ23FE]

I hate you all. LOL

-Jalal

[MJ23FE]

Install Notes & Initial Impressions

Justin and I got these installed in about an hour and half. This included dealing with several stubborn lug nuts, jacking the car up, as well as cleaning up the rotors and calipers. I sanded down the flat outer edges of the rotors where the rust accumulates to smooth it out and get any loose debris off. I did this to all my rotor while Justin slipped the pads into the calipers. On the rear rotors I also cleaned up the rear inside portion where the e-brake clamps on. I did this to get rid of any loose debris and give it a cleaner surface. I didn't go crazy digging into the metal. I just cleared the surface. I should have taken photos of the dust/crumble pile I had after I was done with all 4 rotors. It was pretty bad. I also sprayed down the calipers with windex and afterward quick detailer to get all the salt, road grime and brake dust off them. They still need much TLC. Hopefully I'll be able to send them to TCC sooner than later.

After the install, I pumped the brakes a whole bunch of times to get the pressure back in the lines and get the pedal feel back. It was pretty loose before I did this. I noticed that I had brake feel and grip from the pads immediately after backing out of the driveway to stop the car and get into gear. I was pretty damn surprised. Coming to my first stop, I had normal brake grip right away. No delay, no slack, just straight up grip. Is this due to the layer of pad already on my rotors? Possibly. I'm not sure how these pads would react on brand new rotors. Maybe there would have been some delay that we're normally used to when installing brand new brakes. The pads do make some noise, but it's nothing annoying, at least not to me. I want brakes that will stop. Knowing I have race pads on the car, I don't care if they made a tad bit of noise. I know my car will stop, and stop damn well for that matter.

That's all I have for now since I still need to take a week of easy daily driving to let the pads scrub the rotors. I felt a little bit of shudder when slowing down on the highway at highway speeds. Not hard braking, just normal braking. It seemed to go away when I applied more/greater pressure. I'll be able to comment more on this tomorrow since I drive 30 miles round trip to and from work on pretty much 85% highway. So far I am very pleased.

-Jalal

Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM


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[MJ23FE]

Can a mod please adjust the thread title and remove the "(Coming Soon)"?

Thanks!

-Jalal

[s1ngletracker]

You're really not supposed to run previously used rotors with new pads. The pad transfer has a different makeup depending on the compound of the pad. Also, no need to drive easy for a week. Just bed them in per the manufacturers recommendations and you're good to go.

[MJ23FE]

Originally Posted by s1ngletracker

You're really not supposed to run previously used rotors with new pads. The pad transfer has a different makeup depending on the compound of the pad. Also, no need to drive easy for a week. Just bed them in per the manufacturers recommendations and you're good to go.

Read my original post, dude. I've done thorough research on this.

You should also read this article. It's very informative.

http://www.essexparts.com/learning-c.../swapping_pads

-Jalal

[s1ngletracker]

I find it hard to believe that you will be able to drive them on the street without ever heating them up. If you had a controlled place to scrub the rotors, then fine. Just doesn't seem realistic to me, I'd imagine you end up having a slightly hard time getting them totally cleared of old pad transfer. I read the article and could see how this would work, given the right situation though.

But he talks about starting with a clean slate, and i don't think he's going to argue that machine rotors aren't a clean slate. For a daily driver, that would seem to me to be the quickest way to get up and running with new pads without having to 'take it easy on the street' for a week. machined rotors, bed them in, and good to go.

[MJ23FE]

Originally Posted by s1ngletracker

I find it hard to believe that you will be able to drive them on the street without ever heating them up. If you had a controlled place to scrub the rotors, then fine. Just doesn't seem realistic to me, I'd imagine you end up having a slightly hard time getting them totally cleared of old pad transfer. I read the article and could see how this would work, given the right situation though.

But he talks about starting with a clean slate, and i don't think he's going to argue that machine rotors aren't a clean slate. For a daily driver, that would seem to me to be the quickest way to get up and running with new pads without having to 'take it easy on the street' for a week. machined rotors, bed them in, and good to go.

I'm not being a dick, but in this particular situation, reading > j00.

Originally Posted by Jeff Ritter

http://www.essexparts.com/learning-c.../swapping_pads

My Daily Driven Brake Lathe
If you read my piece on choosing brake pads, you know that most race or track pads are very abrasive when driven cold. In other words, rather than transferring to the rotor face when cold, they primarily generate friction by scraping the rotor face. We're going to use that trait to our advantage, and scrape the old pad material off of our disc faces. We'll do so by performing a series of stops, without ever allowing the race pad to get hot enough to transfer to the rotor. Some compounds are obviously more abrasive than others, but generally speaking, most race compounds with a high coefficient of friction will work for this procedure. I've always used Hawk's Blue compound, which is a safe bet at a fairly affordable price, and comes in a wide range of applications. When going to the track, I usually keep a set on hand in my toolbox in case I need to clean up my rotors.

If you think back to my bed-in procedure in Know Brakes Episode 1, you'll remember that the street pads I was using didn't start transferring to the rotors until they had a substantial amount of heat in them. With race pads, that temperature point is even higher. That makes it easier to quickly and safely get your rotors cleaned up and ready for a pad swap. You can do some fairly aggressive braking without ever getting them to the point of material transfer. So in this case, the procedure is actually the opposite of what you're trying to achieve with a bed-in. In a bed-in, you're performing a series of stops and trying to get the pads hot enough to transfer to the rotor face. During the pad-swap procedure, you're doing a series of stops while purposefully trying to keep your brakes as cool as possible. That means, you don't block off your brake ducts, and you may need to let the brakes cool a bit between stops, rather than just hammering them relentlessly one stop after the next.


The easiest way to clean up your rotors with race pads is to simply drive them around as your daily driver for a few days. Let's go back to our earlier street-to-track example. You did your bed-in with your Hawk HPS street pads. You have a track day coming up in a week. You plan on using Ferodo DS1.11 for that event. The easiest way to prep your rotors prior to bedding in your DS1.11's is to simply swap in the DS1.11's the weekend before the event and drive them around on the street. In normal daily driving, you'll never get the race pads hot enough to begin transferring onto the rotors. During that time they'll be operating in an abrasive manner, scraping the HPS material off of your discs. By the time your event weekend rolls around, you should be back down to bare, shiny metal on your discs. Sure they won't be quite as clean as if you were using brand new rotors, but you should be able to get just about all of the old pad material off of the rotors, providing the perfect canvas for laying down a layer of race compound through a proper bed-in.

Easy enough, right? Well, there is a downside to this solution. A common characteristic of semi-metallic race pads is that they often have a decided lack of cold bite. That means when your wife takes your Viper to buy a gallon of milk and makes a panic stop, she may not get the results she was expecting! Therefore, if you decide to go this route, please be extremely careful. Leave yourself some extra stopping distance, particularly on the first few stops when the race pads are completely cold. The other option would be to use sintered racing pads, which typically have great cold bite.

I had instant bite without any hesitation before stopping IMMEDIATELY after installing the RC5+ pads. I did not have the delay associated with swapping in brand new rotors. You might find it hard to believe. Well there's nothing hard about reading what I just wrote. It happened. Believe it. These are sintered pads, "which typically have great cold bite."

I'll take photos of my rotors tomorrow so that you can see what they look like after about 3.5 days of driving. A pretty big difference compared to what they looked like in my install photos above. 100% conservative street driving. I have not tried to test these yet, or even put heat into them for that matter.

Next week, I'll be performing my bed in procedure and will report back my results.

-Jalal

[MJ23FE]

Some more info:

Originally Posted by Jeff Ritter

http://www.essexparts.com/learning-c...ose-brake-pads

Sintered

While sintered pads have been popular on motorcycles with steel rotors, they remain an emerging technology for automotive use. Most sintered pads are formed from a copper alloy powder. The powdered metal is mixed with other lubricating and wear controlling constituents such as graphite and carbon, formed into the required shape, and then brazed to a backing plate at temperatures as high as 1800 degrees F.

Sintered pads have some unique characteristics vs. other pad types. Their nearly pure metal content provides a stable coefficient of friction from cold to hot, meaning they often need almost no warm-up time to produce bite. Since they’re formed at extremely high temps, they don’t fade under extreme use. They also don’t create as much of a transfer layer on rotors, and therefore don’t require a lengthy, traditional bed-in procedure. Since the pads are semi-porous, they can be used in any weather condition: rain, snow, mud, etc.

Because they are mostly metal, the negatives traditionally associated with sintered pads have been increased rotor wear, noise, and the transmission of heat into the calipers.

The materials, tools, and processes involved with producing sintered pads are the most expensive of all current pad types.

-Jalal

[s1ngletracker]

Originally Posted by MJ23FE

it was recommended to me by Jeff, and later Mike, that I take it easy during the first week of driving and basically baby the car. I was instructed not to heat them up and to keep them as cold as possible. This would allow for the pads to work their abrasion at low temps and basically scrub my rotors which are littered with pad transfer. My hope is that after at least a week of babying the car, my rotors will be nice and clean and I'll be good to go.

If you bed in pads on new rotors properly, the time until you have good braking is a lot less than you specify. Usually it takes me 20 mins or so. I'd like to see some pics though.

Reading does not own me.

What sort of racing are you doing with these, anyway?

[scheides]

Interesting theory on easy driving before bedding in. I dunno if it would actually work, but worth trying I guess. I thought you were getting new rotors though?

[MJ23FE]

Originally Posted by s1ngletracker

If you bed in pads on new rotors properly, the time until you have good braking is a lot less than you specify. Usually it takes me 20 mins or so. I'd like to see some pics though.

Reading does not own me.

What sort of racing are you doing with these, anyway?

Reading still kind owns you.

I don't have new rotors. I never indicated that I had new rotors.I'm looking to see if these pads will scrub the old material off that contributed to the brake shudder I was having at higher speeds. As I indicated many times already, and as Jeff Ritter himself has, the first week should be spent allowing the pads to work as they "scrub" the rotors clean. These are sintered pads and have great cold bite right off the bat. On Sunday or Monday I'll be bedding these pads in. If the pads can't scrub the old pad material off the rotor which contributes to the shudder/warped effect I get, than I'll be purchasing a front set of Centric Premium blank rotors.

My car is a daily driver as mentioned above as well. I am a spirited daily driver as many of you are as well. I want my brakes to chomp down and stop me in my tracks when I ask. My car will not see much track right now even though I'd love to get involved in some HPDE's and the like. $$$ and time prohibit me at this point. Yes, these are a race pad, but yes, they work perfectly fine on the street. I have had no issues at all. Literally from the first roll out of the driveway, these pads worked, and aside for the noise, they have worked great. We've had very very cold days and a snow storm since they have been installed and they do not hesitate for a moment. I don't know how a bed in procedure is faster than rolling out of a driveway and being good to go for a daily driver. They don't require one to work for the simple stuff. It's good to bed them once you plan on using them more aggressively. I still don't understand what you're trying to argue.

I chose to use these pads. I'm not pushing anyone to use them.

Originally Posted by scheides

Interesting theory on easy driving before bedding in. I dunno if it would actually work, but worth trying I guess. I thought you were getting new rotors though?

New rotors will come if this scrubbing process doesn't rid me of the shudder I'm seeing. I wanted to try these first and see if they would do the trick. They may not. No one ever guaranteed that they would, nor did I ever say they definitely would. We'll see what the result is. If they don't, I'll be purchasing new rotors. I think I mentioned that in my initial post.

They are definitely cleaning my rotors up, though. They are cleaner and much shinier than they ever were with the Magic Pads.

-Jalal

[s1ngletracker]

Something you probably know, but running race pads on the street will likely eat up your rotors really fast. Street pads are nice because once you bed them in, you get that instant bite without heat in them, and without ripping up your rotors.

[MJ23FE]

Originally Posted by s1ngletracker

Something you probably know, but running race pads on the street will likely eat up your rotors really fast. Street pads are nice because once you bed them in, you get that instant bite without heat in them, and without ripping up your rotors.

The RC5+ is the base pad from Carbone Lorraine. They have the RC6, RC6E and RC8 which are more aggressive and provide even more bite. These have been tested and used by folks on EvoM on the race track and none had any signs of significant wear that would be alarming at all. This was after a lot of sessions, too. I think I'll be fine daily driving these in regards to rotor wear. I'll keep you updated nonetheless. We'll see how it goes.

Remember, I've got no connection to the company, so if they suck, wear out quick, kill my rotors, etc, I'll let everyone know.

-Jalal

[MJ23FE]

After driving with these pads on all week, I can say that they are definitely loud towards the end of your stop with very light pedal pressure. People either think you need a brake job, or that you're a freight train. They def sound like race brakes, that's for sure. It's only under light pressure when you're creeping in traffic or coming to the last bit of your stop. On the highway and such they're fine. I'll be bedding the pads tomorrow with my buddy Justin and I'll be able to give you guys better impressions then. I can't wait to see how much torque these things have!

1/15/2011
Pictures of the rotors after a week of use

Canon EOS 30D
Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM


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Obligatory Evo photo.


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-Jalal

[Kevin 1G Drummer]

I understand your theory on the pads scrubbing off the old pad transfer, but where do you think that old pad material goes? The answer is into the new pad, most likely causing the shudder you're experiencing. Like you said, your new pads are porous (most pads are, yours are just more porous than most) and all you're really accomplishing is collecting the old pad material into your new pad. It doesn't just magically disappear during the scrubbing process.

[scheides]

If the screeching doesn't go away after the bedding process, I would consider getting the rotors turned (or swapping in a set of new rotors). Hughes had this problem on his IX w/ a different brand of pads and we tried a ton of different things to rid it. In the end, a set of turned rotors cured the squeaks!