Two founders, a weekend-racing following and a new name.

Hawk Performance started under another name. An “About Us” page that the brand’s website carried in February 2002, preserved by the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, says the business was “formerly known as Hawk Brake”. The same page says it was started by Carl Harbert and Gary Worner in the early 1990s, and that it built a strong following among weekend racing enthusiasts. The brand’s current “Why Hawk” page gives a year for that beginning: Hawk Performance, it says, has been providing performance “since 1993”.

The 2002 page also placed the brand inside a larger company. During 2000, it says, Hawk Corporation, then listed on the New York Stock Exchange, decided to launch a major expansion into the performance and motorsports industries. Two acquisitions followed. Quarter Master, bought by Hawk in 1999, made clutches for professional motorsports in Lake Zurich, Illinois. Tex Racing, bought in late 2000, made transmissions and drivetrains for professional motorsports in North Carolina, outside Charlotte. With the brake business, the page says, these three formed the Hawk Performance Group. Hawk Performance itself, it said, was located in Medina, Ohio.

By 2005, the brand described its ownership in different terms. A “Company History” page saved from the website that year, carrying a 2005 copyright line in the name of Hawk Performance Inc., says Hawk Performance brand products were owned and manufactured by Wellman Products Group. The page describes Wellman as a maker of severe-duty friction products for brakes, clutches, transmissions and driveline parts, sold to original-equipment and aftermarket customers in fields including aerospace, on-highway trucks, agriculture, construction, mining, powersports, motorsports and the military. It says Wellman Products Group introduced Hawk Performance disc brake pads into the motorsports arena, and that the brand went on to win a loyal following on the race track and on the street.

That 2005 page closes with the line that has stayed with the brand ever since: “Race Proven. Street Legal.”

From Hawk Corporation to Carlisle to CentroMotion.

The parent company changed hands at the end of 2010. Windtech International reported on 3 February 2011 that Carlisle Companies had completed its acquisition of the Hawk Corporation on 2 December 2010. In the same report, Carlisle announced a new business segment named Carlisle Brake & Friction, and said that from 1 January 2011 its global headquarters would be in Solon, Ohio, the former headquarters of the Hawk Corporation’s Wellman Products Group. The report said Hawk Corporation’s headquarters in downtown Cleveland would close, with its staff moving to Solon.

For a decade, Hawk Performance sat inside that Carlisle segment. The footer of the brand’s website still names it as “a brand of Carlisle Brake & Friction”, and still carries the Carlisle Companies name.

The segment itself was sold in 2021. In a press release dated 2 August 2021 and issued from Waukesha, Wisconsin, CentroMotion announced that it had completed its acquisition of Carlisle Brake & Friction from Carlisle Companies. The release, published by the investment firm One Rock Capital Partners, says Carlisle Brake & Friction was founded in 1920 and is headquartered in Medina, Ohio, and that it joined CentroMotion’s portfolio alongside brands including CrossControl, Elliott Manufacturing, Gits Manufacturing, maximatecc, Power-Packer and Weasler Engineering. It adds that CentroMotion had been wholly owned by an affiliate of One Rock Capital Partners since 2019. Hawk Performance’s website now states that the brand is part of CentroMotion, which it describes as a global manufacturing company working in friction products, mechanical power and information systems, and thermal and motion controls.

On where the pads come from, the brand speaks for itself. Its “Why Hawk” page says Hawk Performance brake pads are designed, engineered and produced in the United States, and that the brand draws on technology used in military and airline applications. The 2002 and 2005 pages agree on the Ohio connection, placing the business in Medina and its ownership with an Ohio friction group.

The range has widened from the race track. The current website sorts its products into street cars, trucks and SUVs, Jeeps and 4x4s, motorsports, motorcycles, Talon rotors and brake fluids, and it has introduced HPX pads for autocross. The brand says it is the official brake product of several motorsports organisations, including the SCCA and the National Auto Sport Association.

Design and documentation.

The brands in this group make the parts that sit between an engine, a wheel and the road: brake pads, discs and calipers, shock absorbers and suspension forks, and ignition and fuel-system components for engines. Aftermarket brands of this kind reach buyers through several routes at once, from parts counters and specialist workshops to motorsport paddocks, and many also supply vehicle makers directly as original equipment.

A component brand’s identity is usually carried by a short name, a colour and a decal rather than by a whole product, because the part itself is often hidden behind a wheel or under a body panel. The company behind that name may have changed hands, joined a larger group or moved production since it began, which makes the plain questions worth asking: who started it, who owns it now, and where its parts are designed and made.

Each guide separates what independent sources record from what the company says about itself — its founding story, its owners over time, where its products are made and how its marks have changed — and marks plainly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One slogan, several owners.

The steadiest part of the Hawk Performance identity is its wording. The phrase “Race Proven. Street Legal.” closed the brand’s company-history page in 2005, and in October 2026 it still headed the brand’s home page, set in capitals above a message about bringing racing experience to streets, dirt tracks and trails. Over the same years the parent company changed from Hawk Corporation to Carlisle Companies to CentroMotion, and the group name behind the pads changed from Wellman Products Group to Carlisle Brake & Friction. The slogan stayed.

The brand’s name has stayed close to its first form, too. The 2002 page records the move from Hawk Brake to Hawk Performance, and the 2000 expansion carried the word further, into a Hawk Performance Group that briefly included clutches and transmissions as well as brakes. Today the name sits on pads, rotors and fluid, and the website groups its range by the kind of vehicle and the kind of driving rather than by technical grade.

Motorsport remains part of how the brand presents itself. Its “About Us” page says Hawk channels what it has learned on the race track into every product it makes, and lists racing schools and organisations, including the SCCA, the National Auto Sport Association, the Ron Fellows Performance Driving School, the Allen Berg Racing School and Stadium Super Trucks, for which it says it is the official brake product. These are the company’s own statements about its partnerships.

The ownership trail can be followed step by step. A founder pair is named on the brand’s own early website; a public company bought it and folded it into a motorsports group; an industrial conglomerate bought that company and created a brake-and-friction segment around it; and that segment was then sold to a portfolio company owned by an investment firm. Each step is recorded in a dated source: the archived web pages of 2002 and 2005, the trade report of February 2011 and the press release of August 2021.

For a design guide, Hawk Performance shows how a short slogan can carry a brand through changes of ownership that most customers never see: the parent names on the website footer changed, while the four words on the home page did not. Compare Wilwood, another American brake name built around racing, and Brembo, an Italian brake maker that grew by buying other specialist names. For this guide we use an amber, a near-black and a bronze with a condensed sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Hawk Performance’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.