The influence of the change with time of friction power on thermal stresses in a friction element of a brake system is investigated. For this purpose, a list of ten different temporal profiles of specific friction power is used, which has been experimentally established for a single braking process. The corresponding profiles of transient temperature fields in the considered element are applied as input parameters to find quasi-static thermal stresses. Numerical analysis concerned with spatio-temporal distributions of the stresses and their evolutions on the heated surface is presented.