Not a dumb question at all.
It's all about the energy. Energy, as you might recall from your high school physics class, can be neither created, nor destroyed. Consequently, it must be transferred.
In a nutshell, when braking, your car is a giant furnace.
To stop your car, you must take the forward momentum of a 3,000-4,000 pound car and turn it into heat. Lots of heat.
Bigger pads and bigger rotors enable more forward momentum to be transferred into heat more quickly. But this heat has to go somewhere so more energy can be transferred, so bigger rotors also allow more heat to be transferred into the air more quickly.
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Never met a man with real talent who felt the need to deride the efforts of other.
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