[Dean]

Wow, onto page 2 in under a day...

Hold onto your money for a moment folks...

I have over 450 track miles on my WRX, and many thousands more on the Stealth and A4, and hundreds of autocross runs on them as well as owning Wilwoods, and Brembos for the later cars, and want to throw in my $.02...

Lets start with brake fluid...

Go down to the Ford dealer and get 3 bottles of Ford/Motorcraft heavy duty brake fluid for about $4 per 12oz. It is hands down the budget racer fluid of choice. Extremely high dry boiling point. Flush & bleed your system with 1-2 bottles and leave the third unopened for bleeding at the track if needed. I have used ATE and others, and for the most part, they are a waste of $$$s. In this case only, FORD owns! All because the were idiots when designing their pickup trucks and ran the brake lines next to the exhaust. Doh.

Onto brakes.

Before you spend a lot of money on brakes, please try a decent set of pads, the stockers suck, and no, you cannot get decent pads at Kragen.

The national champion in STX last year switched from STI 4 pots in '02 back to WRX stockers with good pads in 03! Hmmmm...

First hand experience:
The stock WRX pads will fade in approximately 2 laps at Thunderhill, a fairly nice track for brakes! A set of EBC greens in the same calipers will run 40 minutes straight without fading their, and at Laguna Seca, one of the hardest tracks in the region on brakes. Oh, and the greens will practically stand the car on it's nose in comparison to stock as well. Significantly higher cf. The greens do appear to wear fairly fast, and will fade a bit if you abuse them a lot! I have a set of EBC reds I will throw in before the next track event to try. Greens should be a great autocross pad IMHO.

Other good pad choices I have used for performance street, autocross and some track are Porterfield R4S, Hawk HP plus, and Wilwood Q. I have heard good things about AXXIS Ultimates but have no first hand experience with them like I do the others.

So instead of spending thousands on brakes, wheels, etc. go spend about $100 on pads and fluid first. If you like what that does, maybe another hundred+ on stainless lines, and some rear pads. Maybe some Stoptech directional vented rotors.

Note: Good pads may be nosier on the street than stock. This is a physics thing, suck it up. The same is true of big brake kits.

Speed bleeders are cool, but a friend and a 6 pack or whatever is more fun.

Almost forgot... Learn to brake less. Braking is overrated. You can often get away with braking less than you think since usually the next thing you do is turn which also slows the car, and if you do it right, the car will actually turn better if you brake less and time it with your turn in correctly.

The best thing to spend $ on to make your car faster is on seat time for the driver, preferably with instruction!!!