Braking at its best

After 3 hours of climbing you did it, finally – you reached the top of the mountain and now you’re looking forward to the descent. High speed, tight corners, adrenalin! But…. slowly but surely the grin on your face is fading away. Bad breaking performance, no pressure point, your hands hurt – fading! Almost every biker has already made this kind of experience. It can definitely turn your good mood into a bad one, but most of all, it can turn out to be seriously dangerous as well.

Often, the issues occur due to the use of wrong brake-pads. Most brakes can only reach their full potential in combination with the correct pads for a certain type of rim. Original brake-pads aren’t automatically the best choice: After-market ones gained a lot of ground in the last few years and can easily outperform OEM stuff. We got the chance to test different compounds for different conditions over the last few months - here’s what we found out!

There’s a huge amount of after-market pads, no matter if you look for disc brake-, v-brake- or road-brake ones. Every company claims to offer the perfect compound, which can be quite misleading if you consider the big range of application, different weather conditions and personal preferences. Pad “X” can perform well on rim “Y”, but flops on rim “Z”. The brakes we tested the pads on are: Magura Marta SL (MTB), Shimano Dura-Ace, Sram Force, Ax-Lightness Orion and ZeroGravity. We swapped the original brake-pads on each of them for ones from KoolStop, SwissStop and Corima.

Results of our tests on the mountainbike:
First of all, we want to remind you, that you must not use pads, that are not distinctively approved by the producer. Which means, that it’s not allowed to use sintered metal pads in combination with disc-brakes that are only approved for organic ones. The termic stress is dramatically different and could lead to overheating. Worst case could be a collapse of your braking system with unpredictable consequences.
On the Magura Marta brake-set we took a closer look at the original pads and the ones offered by SwissStop. While the originally installed “rubbers” are already close to perfection, we expected the SwissStop to provide a better longevity. Usually, an average biker already needs a few sets of Magura Marta pads per season. They consist of a rather soft compound that shines with great dosing and superb breaking-power. During long and hard breaking though, a slight loss of grip appears, without effecting their nice overall performance heavily. Price: 18 Euro (per brake)

SwissStop Disc 10 (Marta/Marta SL compatible)
After a relatively long adaptation phase, SwissStop’s Disc 10 turn out to be the icing on the cake when you talk about high-performance break-pads. No matter what, wet or dry, cold or hot, their brute grip on the discs will never let you down. Be careful though – the rather hard pressure point could be an issue for disc-“newbies”. Pulling the brake-lever with just one finger can already lift your rear-wheel from the ground and may even result in an unintended front-flip. Even though these pads are a tad more expensive than Magura’s original ones (21 Euro per set), their higher durability and excellent braking performance pretty much make up for it. Highly suggested!
You still have to consider, that you automatically resign from the manufacturer’s guarantee if you decide to use after-market pads. Martin Schäfer from Magura: “Is a customer using different pads than our original ones, Magura declines the guarantee for every kind of failure. It’s up to the dealer, if he’s offering such pads.”

So what about the road section? As mentioned before, we chose to test two bomb-proof brakes (Shimano Dura-Ace and SRAM Force) and two born-and-bred weight-weenie calipers (AX Orion and ZeroGravity) combined with different compounds and rims. On a side-note, ZeroGravity as well the Ax-Lightness brakes were equipped with Campagnolo compatible brake-shoes.
First of all, I want to state that the original pads from Shimano, Campagnolo and Sram deliver some pretty impressive testing-results already. Superb braking in the dry and very reliable performance in wet conditions. The wheels we carried through our testings with are as followed: Mavic Ksyrium SL and ES, the all-around rim CXP33, Campa Eurus, American Classic 350 and two types of Reynolds carbon-fibre rims.

Alongside the excellent OEM pads, the black compound from KoolStop convinced with outstanding performance on every kind of untreated aluminium rims. Apart from this, the rims didn’t show any significant wear after our tests, which indicates that KoolStops are very gentle pads. For wet days, we suggest their “salmon-pads” or SwissStop GHPs (Green High Performance). GHPs come along with a superb pressure point combined with incredible breaking-force, which makes them the choice for adverse conditions. The pads themselves don’t wear off too much, but the rims suffer from them quite a bit, because the used compound is a tad harder than e.g the compound used by KoolStop. For thin walled rims like Am Classics 350’s we suggest to use the not as aggressive salmon compound from KoolStop.

Concerning carbon-fibre rims, there’s one compound that’s close to perfection: SwissStop Yellow King (yes, these pads truely deserve the name “KING”)! Compared to Corima cork-pads - which have been the only possibility to keep wear low in the early years of carbon rims – the swiss made compound always provides enough braking-power to descent safely, while pads made of cork often lack this charsteristic in the rain. The Yellow Kings offer the best compromise between good durability and strong breaking-power in both, wet and dry conditions.

With almost 40 types of compound for all the common brake-systems and various weather conditions, SwissStop definitely takes the crown for producing the most advanced brake-pads available to the public. Often superior to originally equipped pads, they allow you to align your brakes’ performance to your exact wishes. Especially on the road, when it comes down to personal preferences. Too many different rims, brake-pad compounds, break-calipers and last but not least environmental conditions will make your choice a tough one. Gladly, SwissStop is on the best way to make the grade – amazingly, without any compromises!