You’re absolutely right. I use Wilwoods now in my Wilwood calipers, I used Hawk (HP+ for Street and AutoX, great pads if you don’t mind sounding like a big-rig coming up to stop signs and some dust) previously as well as Performance Friction (PFC-01, amazing road course pads, not very practical/useful outside of the track). Here’s some fun graphs from Wilwood:
The only piece of the puzzle these graphs don’t give you is noise/dust. But you can pretty much assume any of the ones in the upper graph are going to be noisey and dusty, the lowers are intended as street pads and aren’t so bad.
I chose the Hs for my car. I have Qs that I was going to swap on for the street to keep the harsh dust off my bling wheels, but (as you might have read in my other thread) the bling wheels are getting sold anyway so I’m returning the Qs and I’ll just run H’s all the time.
As you can see they work well cold (vital for street and the first few AutoX laps) but just keep getting better w/ more heat. I toyed w/ the idea of A pads, but I’ve been told they are extremely tough to modulate and cause a lot of ABS kick-in in that mid-heat range (aka AutoXin). I think they’d be good in a heavier AutoX only car on really sticky tires (say a ESP Fbody) but not so much the 'vette.
-TJ