Upgrading your brakes

Torque?

In stock form the contour has some pretty good brakes installed. For those of your with 98 SVTs, you have the best combo. Every contour from 98.5 and up uses the small brake pad. Which means the only difference between the 98.5 SVT and SE is only the caliper bracket and rotor. The caliper and pad is the same, I know this is true since I use the Performance Friction pad from the "regular" Contour in my SVT. I had orderd the pre 98.5 pad from ford once, only to find out that it was too big. Also those of you wanting to upgrade your contour with the SVT brakes, you better of getting the baer track kit. It costs about $500 for the SVT and $800 for the track kit. The disadvantage with the baer kit is that most 16" wheels are too small.  KVR also has a kit for about $2000

A note when upgrading rotors. Make sure you have torqued all the lugnuts to a equal amount. If you don't and upgrade your brake pads, the stock Ford rotors will not last. I like to torque mine to 60ftlbs while others like 70 and some others like 80 or so. It all depends on who you ask.

For those just wanting to upgrade the brake pads, which is a good cheap mod, you should go with a carbon or atleast semi metalic. The performance friction pad that I use work really well, but they are a major pain to clean off of the wheels. It actually has stained the stock wheels and hopfully I can keep the 17s clean. EBC has a pad, Mintex has a pad, KVR has a pad and Axis has a pad. I havn't tried them all yet but I've heard that the mintex are a pain to clean and I hear the EBC green stuff are pretty good... tune in later

Power what?

6-12-00 I came back from open-track this weekend and all I can say is that power stops suck. I took it easy on them for a min of 400 miles to break them in, also to take it easy on the new performance friction pads. Since I installed them they make a ugly rubbing sound. I took them to the track and the sound increase by about 400%, its so bad the steering wheel now "shakes" up and down while doing light breaking. Needless to say the stock ford pads and rotors are going back on.

Just for future reference, the torx bit for the front SVT caliper is a T-45 and T-50 for the rear...

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Links: Where to find brakes Contou.org - click on links