Triumph Repair: Triumph Spitfire 1500, triumph spitfire 1500, stock brakes

Question
The brakes on my Spitfire will not slow the car down fast enough(I have dodged many a accident).  There are no leaks in the line or anywhere for that matter. Disk in front, Drum in back, stock parts(lines, brake cylinder etc.) Do you know of anyway for me to improve the brakes of the car.?

Answer
Hi Benjamin,
The brakes are designed for a street use but should have the capability of locking up on a panic stop. If they will not do that on clean dry pavement, then they do need to be looked at as to what is wrong. There can be many different reasons for brakes to loose the capability of locking up the wheels. Worn out front pads and rear shoes, air in the system, Use of DOT 3 brake fluid and other faults. Sometimes on some brake pad material you can make a hard stop from a high speed and glaze the surface of the front pads. If there is plenty of material left on the pads you can just remove the pads and rub them on concrete to take the glaze off and they will work better until another panic stop. Also look at the brake disks to see that they are not grooved.

 Many hard stops from a high speed will usually be so hard on stock brakes, they will overheat and "fade" (even if you have good pedal you loose the ability to lock up the brakes).
Their are several stages of "how far do you want to go with brake modification?"
If you are using the brakes hard from high speed and getting fad, the first cheep thing you can do is buy competition brake pads and shoes. Also learning to decell and smoothly down shift helps. Next step is to install forced air ducts to all brakes to help cool them. If that is still not as far as you want to go, there are competition vented rotors with multi piston alloy calipers for front and rear and competition master cylinders. This step is very costly.
I hope this helps.
Howard