Brake pads OEM Subaru or OEM FORD
as far as stock brakes go, they’re pretty damn good
I had to do a hard stop last week in my all stock 23 wrx and was surprised how fast it stopped.
The wrx pedal feel is actually decent, alright top end bite and it only shows it’s a smaller set of brakes when you’re further down the travel. Are the stock brakes adequate for the car and weight? YES. they do a good job imo to mimic the brake feel of cars with bigger calipers while also being smaller due to the cars price et .
The brakes on my '23 Limited are as good as or better than any car I've driven recently.
these brakes do the job well.
The OE pads do really just suck. The system itself, however is just fine. You should try some different pads of the sportycar flavor (Porterfield R4S, Carbotech Bobcat, G-Lok GS-1, etc.) and see how you feel. I have had no problems with spirited street driving after a pad upgrade. The pedal is actually very well modulated and rather than hitting like a ton of bricks it allows you to control brake friction pretty nicely.
Is it a reasonable price? No not really. Can you just do it at home in the driveway? If you have a driveway, and it's nice if you have someone around who's done it before who can remind you to do things like properly torque the bolts instead of just "by feel" if you're new to this, or add a little anti-seize on the hub so you can get it off in 5 years, without giving you silly quirky advice like a lot of YouTubers like to do to try and make themselves slightly different. What _should_ you do? My suggestion is call a few local shops (even Ford dealerships if you want). Tell them you've got some rotors and pads (order some standard ones off of Rock Auto) and ask what they would charge to install it. Call 5 places, ignore the most and least expensive ones, and if the remainders pick the one you like the look of (check online reviews, see how long they've been in business, etc). Every mechanic has been changing brakes since they were 12, but you want one who looks like they care about their work. A good mechanic with a 2 post lift should be able to do a Mustang brake job in like 20 minutes if they tried to. They'll actually take about an hour and be careful about it. They'll charge you some "standard" hours regardless of clock time because they need to pay for their shop etc. It's cheaper to do it yourself, but not everyone _wants_ to do it themselves, or trusts themselves to learn something from YouTube videos that their life depends on every day.
Mechanically, the wrx brakes are fine, but the feel is so freakin stiff compared to other cars that it really takes a bit to get used to. In emergency braking, you press the pedal thinking you'll stop fine, but you don't press hard enough and come in faster than you thought, press down harder and it's still not triggering abs, and you crash. It's so damn hard to trigger ABS in this car
The WRX has brakes that are worse than all of them. It takes an amount of pedal pressure that had me check if the power brakes were working. The brakes on the WRX are ass.
On my 22 the brakes were not adequate.
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