My ABS light has come on in my '95 M3 and I've tested the brakes, and sure enough, no more ABS. It's not intermittent, the light comes on immediately. This is odd, since it was fine at the last track day. I've done nothing to the brakes in the interim. I'm running PFC01/PFC97 and Hankook 214's with otherwise stock brakes. I have a track day this next weekend and won't be in town to diagnose the car.

Can I run the car without the ABS, or is this asking for trouble? I run in the advance solo group. The track is not brake intensive (Roebling Road).

I cleaned the sensor's when I built up the car this summer.

From the research that I've done, it appears that the pedal travel sensor is the most common culprit, though most stated that the symptom is an intermittent ABS light.

I tried disconnecting the battery to allow it to reset, but it's come back on...one can hope for something this simple.;)

Running the car without ABS is asking for trouble. Get a GT1 or Autologic hooked up to the ABS computer and figure out what is wrong. Could be sensors at the wheels, ABS pump failure, solenoid failure, or pedal travel sensor failure or out of range.

Get it checked out - you will hurt yourself on the track with the ABS in fault mode as it biases the brake pressure to the rear when it faults.

I had exactly the ame experience earlier in the year. All the ABS wheel speed sensors were dirty. I cleaned them. No fix.
I bought a front sensor and a rear sensor and swapped them until I found the bad one. It didn't look bad, but it was intermittent.

Jon,

I appreciate the advise and see will what I can do. Oddly enough, when I tested the brakes (cold and on the street) it was the fronts that locked up.

The track is not brake intensive (Roebling Road).

Define brake intensive...does Roebling use up brake pads? No. Do you ever get to brake in a straight line at Roebling? Hardly. A place with a lot of heavy trail braking probably isn't where you want to experiment with no ABS for the first time. If you do, remember to start really slow.

As for your experience with the fronts locking first so far...that may change some when you're braking from 100+ and all of your weight is transferred forward. Tough to say without experimenting.

My ABS was out at one time and I read a thread on BF about the flat wiring harness inside the ABS Hydro unit going bad... So I took out the Hydro unit and sure enough, I had to solder in new wiring and it now works fine.... Symptom was light always on...

my $0.02

-CKKrause