Upgraded the rear disks, pads, new caliper pins and boots on the 80 drift car today. Drifting just isn’t as hard on the brakes as I had thought it might be, so the stock rear setup seems to be coping fine. I had a problem at a few events that wouldn’t go away, and I finally solved it at the last practice day. On the rear left the shaft bolt had managed to wiggle a little bit loose which I hadn’t noticed. When I did finally notice, I just nipped it back up, checked the rear bearing and everything seemed fine. However, after that I was getting major binding problems on that side, and it just wouldn’t clear.
What I think was happening was that while the centre bolt was a little loose it made quite a bit of friction and heat-cycled the caliper a fair few times. These heat cycles damaged the auto-ratchet mechanism for the handbrake inside the cylinder, which meant it just kept tightening those pads. At the trackside I just gutted the cylinder and it was fine after that, but the brake will get a little sloppy as the pads wear down.
I think I’ll keep it this way though, and gut the other side too, just for a simpler setup. It’s pretty cheap to replace the rear pads on this car so if play does get noticeable I’ll just swap in a new set of pads. Really cheap pads are fine for drifting, as you don’t really get a chance to get the pads up to temperature, and you’re really only looking for the best initial bite as you’re basically on/off.