The market is BEGGING....

[G.Irish]

I think HPS or HP+, did Car & Driver put track pads in and replace the fluid when they went off at VIR? Nah, they were on stock pads with stock fluid and the brakes failed on the biggest braking zone on the track.

The problem is the Z failed spectacularly where no other car in the history of C&D's Lightning Lap did. They use the stock set up on every car and none of them had a zero-warning, total brake failure like the Z did.

They went on to do more testing of the Z's braking system. They had done another brake test with several other cars a few years back, so they used the same test on the 370Z and compared the results.

The 335i did 35 stops before decent brake fade in the previous brake test. When they tried a stock Nismo Z it only did 20 stops before massive fade and that was with upgraded pads from Nissan. The upgraded pads were an option added after the aforementioned impact with the VIR tire wall. Even a stock VW Passat was able to do 25 stops before brake fade.

It took Ferodo pads and ATE Superblue to get decent fade resistance, and even then it only matched stock 335i braking performance.

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I imagine most companies aren't running out on r-compounds on every car they make to see if they oil starve on long corners, because lots do without baffling, accusump, aftermarket pumps or whatever.

I'd agree that for all but hardcore sports cars, track testing with r-comps shouldn't be expected.

Expecting a company to account for 100% of track day failures is unreasonable to me. I definitely wouldn't want to be a beta tester, but now that my car is 20 years old all of the problems are well known and have been corrected by the aftermarket. I imagine the same will be true for the BRZ/FRS twins in time.

I don't think anyone expects 100% reliability under all track conditions for stock and modified cars. But I don't think it's unreasonable for people to expect that a stock sports car can handle some laps at the average race track without major incident. In the case of the Z, there's no reason it's braking performance should be worse than a plebeian family sedan. I'd agree that if you plan on tracking you should get some better pads and Superblue as a matter of course but with the Z it sounds like even that isn't enough.

Another note about the BRZ - that's a new motor in its first year of production. I imagine that there may be a change in the injector in later years. That is why many people suggest waiting for the 2nd year of production on a new car like that... eg 2004 STI. I wouldn't be too upset until Toyota/Subaru tell owners to pound sand like the subframe issues on BMWs.

Subaru does seem to be pretty quick about addressing issues. They may not issue a recall but I wouldn't be surprised if they made some changes for the next model year.