2002 Chevrolet Corvette Z06: Brakes Sound Like This

Sounds like a good reason for raising your asking price ;)

Disappointed: I expected a video of Rebecca Black singing "Friday".

Man, the dealers make a mint on brake work. Autozone lists their premium rotors at $61 each, pads are 44 front and 42 rear. $200 bucks worth of parts at retail. That's a lot of Labor!

$840? Wow, that's one hell of a convenience fee.

I did some digging on a couple of different sites and I get about $200 for a set of front rotors, and front and rear pads. For $600 I could carve a couple hours from my weekend to do my own brakes.

And people are outraged when Audi/BMW/Mercedes dealers change $600-700 for brakes.

F&R pads and rotors on my 740 were $1400 at the BMW store. That's when I dusted off my (limited) mechanical skills from the High School days and re-learned just how easy pads and rotors are on disc brake cars. I've gotten to the point where I can swap pads and rotors in less than an hour at each end and save myself several hundred bucks in the process. And I find that with new rotors I can go 30k plus before any pedal pulsation appears, vs. about 15-18k on "cut" rotors. It's easier to replace them than machine them anyway!

@notfast

Too cruel...lol, too true.

$841 is reasonable. Here were the prices of the parts, assuming they used the Genuine GM parts and not AC Delco Durastop.

Front Pads, $222.22 MSRP
Front Rotors, $91.98 MSRP/each or $183.96 total.
Rear Pads, $102 MSRP

Parts total: $508.18.

Assuming they charged MSRP (usually dealers mark-up a bit above MSRP), that leaves $333.30 for labor. At $120/hr, I think the parts and labor charges were quite reasonable.

You can get genuine GM rotors from a number of sites for about half that cost.

Auto Zone's top of the line pad for this car are $44 front and $42 rear. There is no way that the GM parts are worth a $238 (277%) premium.

Three hours labor also strikes me as at least 1/3 too much for a pro with access to a lift and air tools, however I have never replaced the brakes on a Corvette.

The pads were specially formulated for the Z06 by PBR. I don't think Auto Zone's top of the line pad is comparable in this case. The pads do make a big difference in the stopping power of the Z06 versus the base C5, especially since it's the only difference in the brakes between the 2 cars.

I used 2 sets of the stock Z06 pads, and I found them to be the best blend of low noise and stopping power. The stock pads do squeek a little, but not bad. I just put on a set of Hawk HP Race pads on mine, and I'm now regretting it. About the same price as the stock GM pads, and they do stop incredibly well with noticeable braking power improvement over the stock pads, but WOW are they noisy! They squeak and squeal like crazy, they dust like mad, and it's just not a good trade-off for street use. They do work well when cold, which is unusual for a race pad (although it's technically not a full-out race pad like it's name suggests). I'm thinking of getting another set of the stock GM pads for the street and swapping in the race pads when I go to the track. It's a PITA, but the noise of these race pads are driving me insane.

For day-to-day driving I would wagerr that the Auto Zone pads are just as effective as the stock pads.

If you are a regular at track days then the extra cost on running track pads all the time is probably worth it. But if you only do a couple a year I would take the time to swap in competition pads for the occasion.

The car is being sold. 90% of potential buyers will never know or care. RockAuto has a nice set of $10 pads and $40 rotors.