AVOID Hawk HPS pads!

Here is a message I sent to Hawks regarding my bad experience with the HPS pads.

Quote:

I contacted you guys before but I never got a reply. I purchased Hawk HPS brake pads for my 2009 Mazda RX-8 from racingbeat. Installed the pads and broke them in following the instruction. The pads are completely inadequate to use with the rotors as they are not hard enough to cut into factory rotors to provide adequate friction. Stopping is very dangerous on these pads even after 1000 miles of driving and two mild track days. The rotors never got worn and had dark tarnish due to material deposit. I took them out and put old factory pads back in, braking resumed great right away and the rotors turned into shiny again. Several days ago, I was putting new factory pads back in and noticed part of the dust boots on the piston missing in a very weird way. Mind you the car only has 27000 miles and never driven in snow. The factory pads have rubber shims and SS covers which cover the whole surface of the pads.The rubber shims on the piston side also has cuts in them to allow air flow to cool the pistons. The Hawk HPS pads comes with shims that do not cove whole back of the pads not do they have enough cooling. As a result, part of the dust boots were touching the actual metal base of the pads. In addition to that, the pads were never hard enough to provide adequate braking so they were constantly overheating causing the rubber to burn off. I hope this comes to your attention that as a reputable company, Hawk should stand behind their products instead of ignoring the problems. Here is a photo of my calipers. I now need to rebuild them at least.