00:00
There I was, scrolling my phone, then someone cracked open a Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus.
00:04
Next thing I know, I heard a rip. My friend tried the splits and jeans, but not a drop was spilled.
00:10
Have a blast with Mountain Dew Baja Cabo Citrus, a punch of tropical citrus flavor.
01:15
Captain's Log Supplemental
01:22
So, Miss Vicki. Yes, sir. Do you remember when we were watching those WRL events and some of those
01:29
grid life events where we used to see the in-car video and it had the cameras seeing front and back,
01:35
but it also could see all the telemetry and everything that was going on.
01:41
You know, most of the ones that we liked were taken by the Sentinel system. Remember,
01:46
James came on our podcast earlier? Right. You know, we have no excuse since he lent us one
01:52
for trial and demonstration purposes. We should actually probably put that in one of our cars,
01:56
maybe two. I really think we should. I think we should. I know. Because then we'd look like
02:02
the immature endurance racing team that we are. Oh, wait, I mispronounced that. I'm sorry.
02:10
So does the Sentinel system do? We could have three cameras with picture-in-picture. We could
02:16
have, if we ever get the AIM system to work, open invitation to anybody from AIM to come on
02:20
and give us a little bit of love. We need some help. And then we could have all our telemetry on
02:25
there and then we can have it streamed live into the paddock or around the world to our
02:32
millions of fans. We're apparently very popular in Kenya right now. Don't know why, but that's
02:36
fine. And it can integrate all the available race statistics from like race year and everything.
02:41
So we could actually see how we're doing on video. We wouldn't even have to carry
02:44
around our phone anymore. I love it.
02:58
From the great halls of their house, there are assembled three who hope to one day be
03:04
the world's greatest driving heroes. Created from the cosmic legends of the universe,
03:10
comes our team captain, the vision, Bill Fisher. They're soon to be Wonder Woman, Vicky Fisher,
03:18
our captain Marvel and head flight trainee, Jennifer Scribchuk, and our Batman, the master of tools,
03:25
gadgets and all things mechanical. Our mild mannered soon to be billionaire, Alan Danvers.
03:31
Their mission to fight injustice, share what is right and wrong to get you out of your house
03:37
and come out racing with them and serve all mankind. They are the garage heroes in training team.
03:51
Dominating with Dawson. Let's dominate. Ben Dawson, Ben Dawson, I need me some Ben Dawson.
03:57
Happy birthday, Bill. What's up? It is happy birthday and Miss Vicky's here.
04:02
Yeah. Hello. Hey. Before we get to our first Dominating with Dawson question,
04:09
has, have both of you been made aware that they're remaking Smoky and Madden?
04:15
I have not been made aware of that. I'm into it. Yeah, could be. I just want to know a car.
04:20
What car are they going to use? That's what I want to know.
04:23
Was it just announced or do they have a lineup yet? A few weeks ago.
04:27
I have not heard about that. That's awesome. I wonder if they go vintage.
04:32
Or if they go vintage retro look or if they go with some totally cool and bad assets.
04:39
I would let them see something bad ass and cool as modern. I don't know what it would be,
04:43
though. That's what I was trying to figure out. Supra. Something cool is shit like a Supra.
04:52
Who knows? I'm not saying it's got to be an American car. I mean, I guess,
04:55
Mustang would be cool. Who knows what kind of brands that kind of brand stuff would be tied
04:58
into it. I'm sure it'll be tied to a manufacturer, I'm sure.
05:02
We all know it's got to be who pays the biggest check.
05:06
But yeah, I could think of several modern cars that would be pretty cool for a Mustang.
05:10
Are they still making Camaros or are they about the face of Madden?
05:13
Nope. Camaros. Camaros are done again.
05:15
Yeah, so it's probably not going to be that.
05:17
Not going to be that. Not going to be a Firebird.
05:19
I would love it if this was the rebrand announcement for Firebird and Pontiac.
05:24
That would be fantastic.
05:26
Have you been Pontiac fan?
05:28
I am. I like Pontiacs. My first car was a Firebird.
05:34
That's pretty cool.
05:35
Thunderbird. But anyway, all right, Mr. Dawson.
05:37
All right, let's do, let's do something. I have so many to choose from now.
05:46
Let's see. I was going to do one on burnout, but since you never get to go to the track,
05:51
you can't get burnt out. So you're not going to be of any use whatsoever.
05:55
Wish you were. I mean, not that I wish I was out, but I wish I was good enough to go.
06:00
Yeah, I wish I was at any sort of risk of track burnout.
06:02
I probably didn't really get to go at all this year.
06:04
So this is my version of the track.
06:07
We may drag you kicking in the screen. We've got a plan coming so.
06:10
Okay. All right, Ben Dawson. We have a couple listeners.
06:16
One of them has his own podcast and he's on the left coast there.
06:22
And he has been fighting, kicking and screaming among other people that we talk to.
06:28
And the common refrain is why should I upgrade to racing pads when they're wear parts?
06:34
And what, what purpose is that they're just going to wear out anyway?
06:37
And they cost so much more.
06:39
Wow. You know, I've been in this, in this situation in my own dang self.
06:45
Not so much me. Like as soon as I started doing DEs
06:49
and understood that I could be a lot faster with, you know,
06:52
race pads that would give me the best bite and, you know,
06:55
reduce my stopping distance and be able to help me compress my brake zones.
06:58
I was immediately like, I'm going to go to the fastest grippiest at the time,
07:02
like carbotecs were huge where I was.
07:05
I don't know that they were that big.
07:06
They kind of evolved into G log pads.
07:08
But back in the day when I was doing, you know, even track days before racing,
07:12
I pretty much went straight to the best brake pads I could find.
07:15
Just because to me, yeah, they are a wear part.
07:17
So are tires. I also ran, you know, ran, ran R comps before I needed to ever,
07:21
you know, I used to run in our cops before I ever bought a set of 200 trouble with tires.
07:25
Well, I guess that's not exactly true.
07:27
I have some falcons first.
07:28
And I kind of went to run in R comps just for track days,
07:31
because I wanted to be on the same kind of tires that the racers are going to be.
07:34
I assumed that I was headed towards peck me out of.
07:36
So I would buy the same tires that they run, just so I'd be familiar with it
07:40
and run in the same kind of breaks.
07:41
They were, I mean, in my mind,
07:42
my track day car was eventually going to be a speck me out and I was always
07:45
heading that direction.
07:46
So I wanted everything to be pretty similar to what those guys were experiencing.
07:49
So I could kind of eventually join that field and sort of be on pace.
07:52
So that was my mindset was always like, I wanted to be running the race.
07:56
So I also, I also probably had a more racer as a view of everything about a car or a vehicle,
08:03
because I'd come from go car racing where every single thing on the go car is a wear item
08:08
from the chassis itself, you know, you wear it like everything was constantly being worn out
08:13
or replaced or in that kind of race and like circle track racing or including you.
08:18
Yeah, I kind of beat myself to death.
08:23
You know, so, yeah, so I came into the world of full size car
08:30
tracking and racing with the view that everything on the vehicle is a wear item.
08:34
And it's all you just want the best of everything that you can possibly afford
08:39
So I don't get that exactly.
08:42
But I'll tell you this when I was over on the West Coast starting with most of the
08:48
Endurance Racing I started doing was with Ian Corf and his brother.
08:52
And they were in mind where they were like, yeah, similar kind of thought like,
08:55
you know, why put the best pads on here?
08:57
We're not that we're not that great at drivers all of this.
09:00
I mean, obviously Ben Dawson was there and I was right into the front.
09:04
Anytime they put me in the car.
09:05
But but everybody else they're kind of like, you know, we don't need to have the best
09:08
finest bright pads or that kind of thing because you know, we're not going to exploit
09:13
every bit of every bit of pace out of a mess or things.
09:16
That's sort of what you're hearing.
09:21
It's a combination of I don't think they understand the difference in performance
09:28
And I don't think they understand the duration of pad life to dollar.
09:38
Makes it not that big a difference.
09:40
I mean, if you're running like Durilas gold from your auto zone, you're going to burn
09:44
through those super fast.
09:46
You're going to burn through, you know, more sets of those more quickly
09:51
because you're just you're going to wear them out.
09:53
You're going to they're not designed for that kind of heat.
09:55
You may want to pad this design for the kind of heat
09:57
that you're going to be putting into them with track use.
10:00
So that's part of it.
10:02
You want to pad it's just going to fit the specs of what you're going to be
10:05
So that's going to be a higher level of heat.
10:08
And, you know, it's not just the heat that's the heat that gets soaked in
10:11
and the duration of the heat into the material.
10:14
You know, so this different pads are designed for different
10:17
different aspects of use.
10:19
And so the heat and the heat soak are a big part of it.
10:22
There's a lot of stuff about metallic and non-metallic compounds
10:25
that I don't understand, but that's that's part of it too.
10:27
There's a whole lot of wizardry that goes into breaks.
10:30
And typically use probably going to end up running what most people around you
10:34
recommend or say like, hey, this might be a good balance for a year kind of car
10:37
or something like that.
10:38
You know, just a quick general side note.
10:40
Generally, you want something grippier is your front compound,
10:44
a little bit less grippy compound in the rear,
10:45
unless you just happen to have a brake bias adjust your car.
10:48
You can do a little bit of brake biasing without you choose your pad compound.
10:51
So that's just one thing to think about.
10:53
A lot of people run the grippiest pad on the front.
10:56
And then something that's about two thirds or half is grippy on the back.
11:01
Just as a side note.
11:03
Yeah, you won't you won't race in pads because they're going to stop you a lot
11:06
quicker and they're going to be able to withstand a lot more heat.
11:08
And they're going to make you faster on track ultimately.
11:11
So I wouldn't want that.
11:12
I wouldn't want to be out there trying to do everything I'm doing well.
11:15
And then have to be on breaks that are crappy.
11:20
only as you do like limo stops.
11:22
I want to stop that car.
11:23
That race car like it's a race car.
11:24
So I am and I don't really want to hit the brake pad.
11:29
I mean, hit the brake pedal and not have
11:32
the brakes do what I want them to do.
11:34
Because if you're hitting the brake pedal, I want them to stop me.
11:38
I want that car to hang me up in the belts and stand on the nose.
11:41
You know what I mean?
11:42
So I want to be, I want to be right here.
11:45
I mean, I want to do.
11:47
Have you ever had, have you ever had brakes that were too sticky?
11:51
And the version we had, we ran a pad, a pad compound that was too bitey.
11:56
He had too much bite for the tires that we had.
11:58
We ran a 200 strawberry tires.
12:00
We ran a pad that we all got used to.
12:02
But at first we were all locking the tires up.
12:04
We were running a car with no ABS.
12:05
We were running my old Miata.
12:06
And we put ST-43s all the way around it.
12:10
And we were running 200 strawberry tires.
12:11
And everybody just went out there.
12:13
Like, it took us a while to learn how to dial it back.
12:16
Once we got used to the pad, it was, it was okay.
12:18
And we, you know, braided the use of that pad.
12:20
But we think we moved on to a different set of brakes for the, for the next time.
12:22
But yeah, you can, you can, you can overdo it with the grippy brakes on the car.
12:27
So you want to find the right, the right mixture.
12:28
And there are intermediate steps that you can take.
12:31
So one of the, one of the solutions that we use on the West Coast is they had all heard
12:35
that, have you ever heard of legendary lemons team Isor?
12:40
So Isor racing has a bunch of Mazda engineers and they race this Miata.
12:45
What I think they put a turbo on it.
12:46
But there's nothing, nothing that fancy is mostly just really good driving
12:49
and really well-drilled pit stops.
12:51
But they had on one of their website, their website,
12:53
they had about to build their car.
12:55
They said that they were using stop-tech 309s, which is kind of an intermediate sport pad,
13:01
more than an endurance racing pad.
13:05
Yeah, more of a track day pad, but they were saying, hey, we were using these.
13:08
And so we used several sets of those on our car.
13:11
And for the most part, they were fine.
13:12
They didn't, they didn't overheat.
13:14
They weren't too bad.
13:15
They also just weren't the best brakes you could have.
13:17
But that was something that we used as an intermediate step.
13:20
And it kind of got us part of the way.
13:21
There's also things you could do where if you're tracking a car,
13:24
but maybe not doing full endurance sense, you might be able to get away with something
13:27
like a hawk HP plus pad that's still around.
13:30
I'm not even sure if that's still a thing.
13:33
But something that's an intermediate, more of a track rod across pad might get you
13:37
kind of part of the way there.
13:38
And, you know, those are even pads that people will run on the street some.
13:42
You hear people complain that the intermediate pads are noisy or dusty on the street.
13:47
But I mean, who really gives a shit if you're trying to run around,
13:50
if you're running around in your track, take car on the street.
13:53
You know, you could change, if you change your pads and rotors out,
13:56
going to and from the track, you are a super nerd.
13:59
If you're also, if you're driving around in your track, take car with your track day pads.
14:04
You're also some kind of super nerd.
14:06
I wouldn't sweat it even with it.
14:08
But you do want to, you do want to keep your rotors kind of embedded or
14:13
pregnant with one kind of compound.
14:15
You don't be switching back from your street brakes onto the same rotors
14:18
that you're running your track brakes on.
14:20
So that's something else to think about.
14:21
You can't just kind of swap pads back and forth.
14:23
You want to keep pads kind of purely mated to the brake lining or pad material that you use.
14:30
Does that make sense?
14:31
Well, it's not that you can't.
14:33
It's that you shouldn't.
14:36
You can do whatever the hell you want.
14:37
That's not a great idea.
14:41
Ms. Vicki, what did we miss?
14:46
Well, no, no, I get it.
14:51
My whole thing, one of my early learning things about the brake pads,
14:59
especially for beginners that are out there, was that when you're on the track
15:05
and they have you going through all these, through the program, and they tell you,
15:12
when you come off the track for new drivers, your immediate thought is to just
15:26
I learned a hard way early on, again, for new drivers and new track people.
15:34
If you do that, your brakes are so hot coming off the track that they will actually warp
15:47
So keep that in mind, too, when you're using your brake systems.
15:53
And that goes for any brake when you're tracking, in general.
15:57
And the other thing, too, to notice that when you're actually working on your car with your
16:02
brakes and your rotors, is that you can actually start to tell,
16:04
know that they've now learned along the way.
16:07
So you can tell when your rotors are starting to fail,
16:09
when you start seeing fine line cracks in them.
16:13
So you see your rotors that kind of get hardcore worn out,
16:20
but then there's also, look for the fine line cracks.
16:23
And that means it's time to change those out and switch over to something better.
16:29
That's a good point.
16:30
You ready for the number one tip in brake pads?
16:36
The number one tip is to call up Wendy at Porter Fields.
16:42
And say, I have this car, and I'm using it for this kind of racing.
16:48
What do you think I should get?
16:50
You know, I've done that.
16:51
And I've also done this other tip that not everybody knows.
16:55
I've said, this is at the time we were running a champ car, jump car.
16:59
I was like, hey, this is for our jump car team.
17:01
You got any kind of racer discount?
17:02
And she goes, yeah, 15% off.
17:06
So that's another benefit of calling right up.
17:07
You might just say, hey, this is for a competition team and we're doing this
17:10
and we'd be happy to.
17:11
I said, hey, you sent us the first stickers in the box.
17:13
I'd be happy to put them on there.
17:14
She's like, don't even worry about it.
17:16
Here's your 15% off.
17:17
So that's something that's worth talking about.
17:19
Because I had been calling.
17:20
I had been getting them from some dude in California paying a full sticker price
17:24
plus his markup and all this stuff.
17:26
And then I needed some advice from the factory.
17:28
So I called and she's like, oh, you can just order them right now.
17:31
And I got a discount.
17:32
So that was what immediately turned me on to making the call and talking to Wendy.
17:38
And if you care about brake pads and brakes and rotors and everything about that,
17:43
we had Wendy on the wolf, man.
17:47
Oh, it was a while ago.
17:49
A hundred episodes, 600 episodes ago.
17:52
It was a bit less linked.
17:53
Let's link that baby in the show because I haven't even heard that one.
17:56
I'd like to check it out.
17:59
I think she came on and I've tried to get her back on.
18:01
She's like, but we covered everything.
18:03
And I'm like, but Wendy, we just like to talk.
18:06
Don't you know that bit?
18:07
But she's, she was pretty spectacular.
18:11
And we hope she'll come back on.
18:15
But yeah, that's cool.
18:17
She's, she knows her stuff.
18:19
She's been there a while.
18:21
And it was, you ready for this?
18:28
I knew it was way back.
18:30
I was way, way back.
18:33
So she covers brakes and rotors.
18:36
Everything for racing and why you want certain things
18:39
and why you don't want certain things.
18:40
Which is more important, like drilled rotors.
18:46
She was a favor of.
18:47
She's like, slotted can work.
18:48
You don't need it like you used to.
18:50
But drilled is a no-go, except for.
18:54
You talked about those cheese rotors.
18:59
So, I mean, I don't know if we've fully answered the question
19:02
and query you've been getting from your friends who are
19:05
not fully on board with the necessity of buying race pads.
19:10
But I think it's, I think it's worth doing if you're,
19:12
if you're trying to kind of up your game on track
19:14
and trying to ultimately be somebody who's going to be a racer,
19:18
go ahead and start driving and equipping yourself
19:20
the way the racers do is what I did.
19:22
And it helped me become a better driver
19:24
in a faster, shorter amount of time.
19:27
Something else to think about too is,
19:29
is for most of us and most of the stuff we drive,
19:32
rotors themselves are relatively cheap.
19:35
I mean, I think I could get me out of rotors
19:37
for like E30 rotors back in the day
19:39
for like 13 bucks a piece or something like that.
19:41
So keep yourself a set of rotors
19:43
and that goes with your track pads
19:45
if you're going to be swapping them in and out.
19:47
But also just don't worry about,
19:48
don't worry about your rotors.
19:49
And like Vicki said,
19:50
if you see little hairline cracks start popping up,
19:53
go ahead and get new ones.
19:54
It's not worth waiting around
19:55
and potentially having a brake pad explode on your ride.
19:57
Just having some kind of failure with the brakes
19:59
because a failure with the brakes will lead to
20:02
potentially a failure with your whole car or your health.
20:07
And you are borderline breaking the first rule of racing.
20:11
Don't skimp on safety.
20:15
Oh, are brakes not just a wear item
20:17
but a safety item though?
20:18
I believe they are.
20:19
I mean, you know, they do both.
20:23
So anyway, hopefully that helps some of our friends out there
20:28
and especially one particular West Coast guy
20:30
who keeps hiding his head in the sand.
20:34
Go get the good ones, buddy.
20:36
Yeah, let's do it too.
20:42
Thanks for having me on that one.
21:00
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