It really does depend on your style of driving and speeds you drive and stop at, road grades/hills that you drive on, how hard and often you brake and if you downshift and/or coast down to lower speeds a lot.

I have 25K and change miles on my car right now... and I went out and pulled my wheels off last weekend since I figured my OEM Brembos were probably about due to be changed. I have had a set of Project MU B-Force pads sitting around in my house for the past 9 months just waiting to be put on... but it looks like they won't be going on for a bit, since my front pads still had about .26" left on both the inners and outers with the recommended minimum pad runout before replacement being at or around .03". Brand new, the fronts have somewhere around .34" of pad thickness(I don't remember the exact number, but it was around there)... so I still have a good 2/3rds of my pad life left with 25K miles already on the car.

On the other hand, I've read a bunch of stories of other people running through a set of Brembo pads after a single weekend at the track, and others who did it in like 8K-10K miles on the road(probably all really hard miles).

 

If you are comparing the non to the Brembos, that's not necessarily true.

As from the data shown, the rotor dia of the two systems are diff. So brake force applied could be different across these systems.

What you probably mean is the front/rear brake BIAS is probably close inbetween the two systems. But wouldn't be suprised if the Brembo system supplied more rear bias for performance. (given the huge rotor size and 2 piston caliper)

 

That sounds right... I changed my OEM Brembo pads at 60K; they probably could have gone 70K... I drive in Houston traffic daily and drive real hard on nights and weekends

 

Just for clarification, the OEM rear brembos do not have a 13.07" rotor. I know that it is stated as such in some Nissan sources, but it was a misprint.

The fronts are 324mm. The rears are 322mm, so there's no way the rears are larger than the fronts.

I'm running 13.5" rotors up front and the OEM sized brembo rotors in the rear, so I've checked them first hand.

 

Oh, 60K... thats good to know! I am at 30K so good to know I should have some life left in them. I love my Brembos just because they look sick and they helped prevent me from rear ending a car in traffic today.

 

If you are planning on tracking the car the 05 brakes will not hold up. I have burned through one rear rotor because the fronts begin to fade so bad the rears end up doing more work. Take a look at the difference in pad surface area and you'll see why it won't take long for the pad to disappear and metal to metal sparks begin to fly. I decided to replace the rotors with Stillen's (Brake Pro's) drilled rotors and on track days used EBC's yellow stuff. To my extreme dissappointment the fade appeared again and this time the rear rotors cracked due to the heat and the cross drilling and I was unable to finish my last session.

This car is heavy and a lightly modified G can really get up there on the straightaways so when braking you are asking way more than what the stock 05's can handle.

The other issue becomes brake pads themselves. My '05 uses the M45/Q45 calipers and to date I've only been able to find Hawk HPS (which absolutely suck) and EBC's Yellow Stuff (just about as bad) compounds. Most of the brake pad manufacturers don't know that the '05 (not sure about '06's) use the M45 calipers so you have to fake them out when ordering. Hawk does not make the Blue compound (one of the best for tracking) for the M45 (which makes sense, who's tracking an M45 or a Q45??) so you're stuck with a less than capable selection of compounds.

My solution? AP Racing BBK front AND rear. I was recently at a track day where one of the guys had the 14.25 AP front but stock rears. We went out on the track and his rear brakes started complaining. Again, reference the size of the stock rear brakes, single piston... They just can't handle it.

I was on searching for those that have the BBK and track to see if they experienced any problems and ran across this thread and thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.... Trust me, I've spent an S-load on brakes when I probably should have just bitten the bullet and dropped the $3,500 on the BBK.

I would love to know if the stock Brembos perform better, I would hope that they do, most of the 350Z's with the track package don't seem to complain about the brake fade like I have!