Mechanical advantage of drop bar brake (only) levers (not brifters)

[choke]

I ran into the same problem of the pads hitting the fork on my Racer Ms. I switched to road style holders and pads and I'm much happier with those. I use SwissStop pads.

I run Campy 10sp Ergos with the Racer Ms and I have no complaints with the power. If you want to keep the levers Campy, one option would be to find some more modern Ergo levers and gut the shifting mechanism. On my Scapin MTB, I'm using gutted Athena 11 levers with the Euclid brakes (U-brake) and they work great IMO.