Willie Gee

From the Cobalt Friction website:

"Description: Cobalt GT-Sport is a class-winning autocross compound exhibiting very good cold performance, strong/solid initial bite, linear pedal feel with excellent modulation, and high fade resistance. Along with its excellent performance, the GT-Sport compound is rotor friendly and has very good wear rates over a broad operating temperature range. For the serious autocross driver, the GT-Sport will let you take back the time under braking! Also suitable for spirited street driving (i.e. canyon and mountain drives, etc.) and novice to intermediate level HPDE events."

pictures of the pads new:



As a Community Organizer on S2Ki.com, many visitors ask me for my advice and endorsement of products. In turn, I also ask around trying to figure out which parts will help the performance of an already capable vehicle.

I feel I need to share some bad news about the Cobalt GT-Sports Ver 2. I fear that people may be putting their lives at risk running these pads. Please read my lengthy post to understand why.

If you purchased any of these after June 2007, and they are not making any noise: check your rotors and if they are damaged please PM me. If your pads squeal like a pig in heat, sleep soundly; you have very good pads that won

Sr2oD3

sorry to hear that about your wheels, brakes, heck your whole setup.

Excellent post and I hope this will benefit others with the issue at hand...

daktruckie99

Dare I ask how helpful Cobalt has been?

Sorry to hear about your experience, and more importantly the damage to the car.

Willie Gee

Despite my horrible issues with these pads, I can't speak badly of Andie Lin, he did an excellent job communicating with me throughout the process. Sometimes sh!t happens, and a bad batch can be created and sold. I can deal with that, and this is one of the main reasons I installed another set of Cobalt GT-Sports on my car. I wanted to determine if the first bad experience was an anomaly. After I removed the first set, i installed my old HAWKS. No issues. A few days (maybe a week later) I got my second set of Cobalt GT-sports and new Brembo Rotors. I installed the Cobalt GT-Sports only to discover the same disasterous results I had the first time: The rotors became deeply grooved in about a month, the pads became severely worn.

After replacing pads and Rotors 3 times in 4 months, I still need to replace my front wheels, wet sand pretty much my entire car, and spray a new clear coat to get my car back to the condition it was in before I purchased the Cobalt GT-Sports.

That said Cobalt has not stepped up to help me out with the damages to my rotors, wheels or car.

daktruckie99

That's what I was wondering. Lots of $$ spent on a poor pad design.

Ubetit

What a mess. I hope Cobalt can give you some support after you prove the pad compound is screwed up.

chickdr

Prove? It looks pretty clear cut from the photo's. The company knows when he purchased/installed each set and the time frame which passed afterwards. Looks like the company owes him a new set of wheels/rotors and paint repair. I wonder if insurance would cover such an incident(or your credit card company - if you used plastic) Many platinum cards offer free insurance when you buy with their CC.

LiQUiD iCE

Yikes! I have Cobalt GT-Sports that were purchased back in 2005. I only used them once at the Fall Colors '05 track event, and then again yesterday for the Fall Colors '07 Track event.

I obviously don't have the bad batch (mine are probably too old anyways) because I haven't had any problems on the track with destroying rotors or anything. I use different pads for street and autox.

Maybe Cobalt will step up and take care of you. Hope everything works out.

slipper

Did colbalt send the second set of pads and rotors free?

Willie Gee

Cobalt Friction sent me the second set of pads without cost, but I paid for all of the rotors.

So far three people that have had similar experiences have PM'd me.