Reply to "Vintage racing brakes"

Modifying brakes -and steering- are both serious subjects and I (or George) assumes no responsibility for your work. Be warned!

For those NOT looking for exact Gr-4 appearances, its pretty simple to adapt Wilwood 4-piston calipers to a '71-76 Pantera. Wilwood Superlite ll calipers have mount holes that are slightly too small. So you elongate the bolt holes and oversize them on new centers closer together. Then using the inner tapped hole with a stock bolt, you mark, drill and metric-tap a third hole for the stock mounting bolt in the steering arm. No adapter needed but you may need a shim to center the pads, depending on what vented rotor you adapt.

On some Panteras, the fresh drilled-&-tapped hole gets VERY close to the edge of the forged-steel steering arm (the reason for respacing the Wilwood mount-holes closer together), so on some cars, a small gas-welded 'lump' of steel can be added and filed smooth, to reinforce the threaded hole against cracking. That part of the steering arm does not take steering loads, only loads from the caliper. Our car was so modified some 16 years ago and no problems so far with thousands of miles and many open track days.

My ATE 2-piston aluminum calipers from a '70s 911-S Porsche look similar to the very expensive aluminum 4-piston race-Girlings and to the calipers shown in above posts. They are front calipers I adapted with a bracket to fit in back, in place of the toy-Girling 1-piston stockers. If you do this, be prepared to rig up some sort of legal e-brake to replace that built into the Girling rear stockers.

The ATEs & vented 911 rotors are good brakes; we lost both front brakes in the OEM master cylinder going to 'Vegas one year with Judy driving. The other Panteras had left 30 minutes before we did. She caught the rest of the Nor-Cal pack in the mountains using only the rears, then stayed with them to 'Vegas. She commented that the brake pedal 'got kinda long....' but otherwise drove fine. I drove us home after the Fun Rally, and replaced the pitted master cylinder with a Byars power assembly. 600 miles on rear brakes only with Porterfield pads. We were not driving 55 mph.