With this short text, in the sum­mer of 2010 the Uci marked a turn­ing point in the cycling world, accept­ing the tech­ni­cal devel­op­ment of the brake sys­tems in cyclocross event, just a bit later after the moun­tain bike disc brakes have lit­er­ally made a clean sweep of out­dated v-brake and ancient cantilever.

Catching the ball, we imme­di­ately asked if we could use this sys­tem even on the race bike, unfor­tu­nately we had a neg­a­tive response. The UCI, how­ever, leaves a door open to sim­i­lar solu­tions, as they have always accepted hydraulic non-disc brakes. While fail­ing to under­stand how a rim can not be seen as a disc, we imme­di­ately reminded about the mother of all our car­bon bikes, the Colnago Concept (1987) equipped with a hydraulic rim brake system.

The advan­tages of an hydraulic brake rather than a mechan­i­cally one are the increased reli­a­bil­ity, the lower main­te­nance and the higher mod­u­la­tion com­pared to a slight increase in weight and a bit ‘of trou­ble in the first assem­bly. As has hap­pened in the auto­mo­tive, motor­cy­cle and in the “fat wheels”, we believe that also in the race bike there is room for a hydrauli­cally actu­ated brake system.

That’s why we started again to study this kind of sys­tem, both in lab­o­ra­tory tests and on the road, with stun­ning results!
Stay tuned, the rev­o­lu­tion is going to start very quickly.…

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