Here’s a quick guide towards choosing the best brake pads for your motorcycle. What you need to know is the type of motorcycle and what it is being used for. The below guide is listed with the most popular riding style first with a bedding in guide at the end.

General Street Motorcycles – Highway use

If your ride is in the lighter half of modern bikes and below 400cc engine size and also ridden at speeds below 100-120 km/h, a premium organic brake pad will be more than enough. EBC Brakes produce an excellent material for this application of which to date over 35 million sets have been sold and used by motorcyclists globally on lighter bikes and scooters. These pads are capable of replacing sintered or organic original products and are safety tested. EBC organic brake pads deliver good stopping power, medium to long lifetime and minimal brake fade. Rigorous tests also include evaluation for wet weather braking and these brake pads have therefore passed that test.

If your bike is heavier and faster and again used for street riding, the EBC organic brake pads will certainly work fine in most cases. If you want to move up and look at a longer life and bite then the way to go is to move towards a semi sintered or fully sintered brake pad. The EBC V-pads™ are a semi sintered type that are popular with cruiser style bikes and classics with a slightly lower friction level or bite. Whereas the EBC fully sintered Double-H™ brake pads offer very long lifetime and superb high friction braking. The Double-H™ brake pads are HH friction rated  (highest known) and have become a world number one choice and remain best brake pads for Sport bikes and Superbike motorcycles, plus they are available in three different compounds. 
The standard road going Double-H™ gives very long mileage and superb braking on fast street riding, heavy loads and high speeds. The EPFA Extreme Pro grade offers a slightly refined and more heat stable blend of brake pad that offers combination street and track use and allows you to ride your bike to a track event, race it and ride home safely numerous times. Again the EPFA brake pad is fully homologated according to ECE R90 and street legal worldwide. If you are purely using the bike for race use the new EBC GPFAX pads are a superb choice and have an ultra high friction and excellent heat stability. They are however too grippy for normal street use and are not approved for highway riding. 

Road Race brake padsThe EBC Brakes sintered GPFAX brake pads are best brake pads for racing motorcycles and a great solution, not only last well, they heat up perfectly and have the highest friction levels known or even possible making fingertip braking easy. Race riders will need to re-evaluate braking markers with these brake pads as they quite literally stop faster than most other brake pad types. When using any new brake pad compound a consideration of the previous pad used needs to be made. A pad containing carbon will lay down a grey glaze on the rotor that needs to be broken down with a scratch pad/ fine emery or abrasive paper to reveal the bare steel of the rotor to avoid contamination of the new pads and low brake effect or judder.

Bedding in new brakes

When fitting and using new brake pads a break in period must be observed while riding the bike, with frequent gentle brake applications for up to 300 kms in street use, or 2-3 laps in race use, gradually increasing the brake pressure towards the end of the bed in period. The best performance is when the brake pads are bedded in of course totally and it’s in the riders hands to gradually build up confidence in the new brakes without leaving braking late (unless in an emergency of course). A badly worn/scored or ridged brake disc or rotors will ruin pads and reduce braking even to unsafe levels for many kilometers.