Mood: our good old rim-brake bikes…

This is a personal post. I confess here that I stand by rim brakes for road cycling. This is just my opinion and I alone am responsible for it, but here are my reasons.

By Bruno Cavelier / Text published in Cyclo Coach n°66, currently on newsstands – Photos: Pxhere.com / pixnio.com / Scott-sports.com / @3bikes.fr

I prefer rim-brake road bikes. Perhaps it’s due to my advanced age, which I dare not reveal here, but here are some clues. I started playing racer when I was 10 with my childhood friends in Pézenas. We would ride around the pond and award ourselves points for each lap. We renamed ourselves after the cycling stars of the time. I was Freddy (Maertens) because I had strong thighs, one was Felice (Gimondi) for his natural elegance, the other Poupou because he never won… In short, no one chose to be called Eddy; too pretentious, the Cannibal was sacred. To think I have half a century of cycling under my belt… Well, I’m getting off track, but not entirely.

Because for me, a bike should look like a bike. I already had trouble digesting the sloping top tubes of the 90s, and today’s aero frames with their square, massive tubes, where the stem seems to have no neck, with no cables showing, their seatpost that no longer looks like a post, and their famous disc brakes, it’s all too much for me. Because a bike should have a certain finesse to contrast with the harshness of our sport and the cyclist who pushes it, thin tubes, delicate details, and brake calipers for a nobility that distinguishes it from motorized two-wheelers.

A bike should have a certain finesse to contrast with the harshness of our sport and the cyclist who pushes it…

Why do you brake?

And besides, a bike isn’t made for braking. What distinguishes an experienced cyclist from one who isn’t, is a choice of lines, a modulation of effort, which often makes braking superfluous. Or at worst, it should only be a delicate action aimed at adjusting speed by a single kilometer per hour. For that, no need for pads biting into metal! The whisper of a pad sliding on carbon is quite enough.

Moreover, powerful braking only occurs in an emergency. And in that case, discs or rim brakes, we cross our fingers to avoid a crash. It’s our dexterity, aided or not by the good luck charm above our heads, that determines whether we bite the dust or not.

Are you a mechanic?

It’s not the weight that disc braking adds to a bike compared to rim braking that bothers us – a few tens of grams that we don’t care about, knowing that it’s better to lose them from our love handles – but the technical aspect. Change wheel brands and, to within half a millimeter, the rotor will slyly make one side of the caliper squeal.

And then, you’ll have to adjust it, but it’s not simple. Then one day, you’ll have to bleed your system with a whole specific array of tubes and syringes, like a mad scientist. The operation is quite delicate; trust my experience since I maintain my cyclocross bikes… with disc brakes. Because for that discipline, I am a fervent supporter of this new technology. I told you, this is just my opinion. So, discs or rim brakes, it’s up to you to decide!

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