Reply to "Big bearing front spindles?"

I agree with Tony- the rear brakes are marginal. The front calipers are excellent and front rotors are easily upgraded in a variety of ways. The overall thickness you need depends entirely on whether you track-race the car and how hard. BTW, vented rotors stabilize temperatures 100 or so degrees F lower than solid rotors but this only happens after many repeated hard stops. A 0.81"-wide vented rotor will also overheat if pushed too hard. This doesn't happen on the street, by the way- which is why many street conversions from vendors use same-thickness vented rotors as stock: 0.81". They also allow one to use stock calipers. A 1.25" thick rotor (same as was used in the LeMans racers in '72) is pro-track-sized and won't overheat unless you really beat on your car, but are quite a bit heavier and need wider, heavier calipers to fit them. All this extra mass also really needs heavier springs and better shocks to control the extra weight. Your call as to how bad you need 'big brakes'.

Rear rotor swaps are a problem; first because you must remove and completely tear down the rear uprights before trying to fit things up. This stops many owners right there. Next, you find that the 'hat' section inset for the rear must be machined to clear the outboard protruding section of the rear upright- which takes a much larger open space inside the 'hat' than at the front. So the 'same' rotors won't work on both ends unaltered. The 3rd little difficulty is clearance between the rotor 'hat' and the wheel stud-heads. This can also change a little in either direction once everything is torqued down and hot. I've seen vented-disc conversions that hit the stud-heads hard enough to leave grooves; not a good idea in a part holding your wheel on!

Not racing our Pantera for money, I converted to early Porsche 911 0.81" thick vented discs (virtually identical in thickness & OD to stock Pantera except for the hat adapter needed). This was nearly 20 years ago. I ran the Porsche discs for several years using Pantera calipers, then upgraded the rear calipers to early Porsche 911S aluminum front 2-piston calipers with a simple strap adapter. These nice calipers have a little over twice the pad surface area of stock Pantera rear caliper pads. They are easily balanced to either the stock 4-piston Pantera caliper or Wilwood Superlite 2's, using a manual adjustable proportioning valve. With this final combo plus the stock non-adjustable proprtioning valve AND the problematic brake warning light/shuttle valve gone, I'm able to lock up 245-50 fronts OR 295-50 rears in a full panic stop. The thing truely has super-brakes.

Jack's Rules of Thumb on Brakes:
1)- If in a full-panic stop on clean dry pavement, you CANNOT lock up any wheel, you need bigger or improved brakes.
2)- If you CAN lock up a wheel, you need more tire to fully use the brakes you already have.
3)- Once #2 is achieved, you then continue increasing the tire patch size and the brake performance, correctly balancing each incremental change with a manual proportioning valve, until either you run out of money or need tires too wide to fit under the fenders.

A final warning: fooling around with brakes on a street car is serious business, more so than for racing. Some enthusiasts who exceeded their skill-level with brake swaps have wound up under a semi-trailer. If you have ANY doubts as to what to do here or how to do it, the vendors all have fully-sorted brake upgrade kits, with copious instructions. They are not that expensive, either. I recommend them compared to some of the scary home-grown conversions I've seen.