Best brake pads for floating-disk 3.8 M5?

Yes, the later 3.8's with the Nurburgring brakes have unique pads unfortunately - the difference to the earlier 3.8 pads seems to be slight, but enough to screw up any chance of finding a set easily.

I ordered a set of Ferodo DS2500's for my last change only to find they didn't fit. You can get custom pads made to any pattern but it gets very expensive (about £200 a set unless you do a 5+ group buy - ).

Have a word with either Bexley Motorworks on 020 8304 9797, Birds on 01895 810850, or Moseley Motorsport on 01952 503992

If price is of no concern then the best upgrade would be a new AP/StopTech brake kit. You could go to 360mm discs with 4 or 6 pot calipers and a ready supply of AP-compatible pads from Ferodo, Mintex, et al. - £3k is a bit steep though. It may be possible to simply buy similar spec AP calipers to fit the standard BMW discs.

BTW just take a spare set of pads with you - it is only a 10 minute job once you have the wheels off.

I've also found out the late e34 (post July 1994) M5 uses the same calipers as the 850CSi, so it may be easier to look for pads for that as they only used one type of pad, rather that getting confused looking at e34 M5 pad variations.

The Mintex code for the fronts (for both 850CSi and M5) is MDB1550, the rear is MDB1552 and I believe these are M1144 as these are the only ones available for 'fast road' use - the 1155, 1166 and 1177 are for competition use only.

I have someone searching for Ferodo pads for me at the moment - specifically the DS2500 for road use and the DS3000 for track use as I can swap them in and out when I need to.

mmm-five : Many thanks for the part numbers. Having rung loads of people (nine calls!) trying to find out (a) what the correct pads were and (b) if they had any in stock, the most helpful by a very long way were Performance Braking Limited on (01600) 713117. They were recommended to me on the M5 mailing list and the guy there spent ages going through various books and ringing people to find out what pads I need. He came up with 2 different numbers for the Pagid Fast Road pads - FR1036 or WVA21153 for the fronts, and FR1018 or WVA20996 for the rears. Price is around £40 per axle.

Kevin : No problems with the standard pads, in fact these are the best brakes I have ever had on a car, but as I am going to put new pads in, I thought I'd look around and see if there's anything better available. I'm also going to get a set of Pagid Fast Roads for my 911 - it has a set of Lucas Girling pads which I installed in 1996 and 20,000 miles ago, so I imagine that braking technology has moved on a bit since they were put in!