Why You Should be Riding a Disc Brake Road Bike [RoadBikeReview]
Have you ever been riding down a wet, leaf covered road, approach a corner and think “Ooh, I better be easy on this corner, it’s slippery.” You gently apply the rear brake and before you can think “I’m falling”, your backside is being grated like swiss cheese on the asphalt at 20 mph? In today’s modern litigious society, nothing is our fault anymore. We have to blame something or someone. So who’s to blame for you running out of talent on that slippery corner? How about that archaic caliper braking system on your bike?
All your friends are enamored with your new carbon fiber wheelset that you just dumped more coin on than your used Toyota Corolla. They look mighty fine, but hey, unless you want to try and pull a Fred Flintstone heel braking technique with your crotch on the top tube, don’t dare ride them in the rain. Oh, and if you damage the braking track on those spendy carbon hoops, you might as well make some stylish earrings out of them, because that’s about all they’ll be good for. Again, it wouldn’t be a problem without those blasted brake calipers.
These types of sleep depriving issues used to be the woes of even the hairy-legged caveman counterpart to the road biker; the mountain biker. But in the late 1990s, hydraulic disc brakes became all the rage, and have since become one of the greatest technological innovations in mountain biking history. Ask any mountain biker who’s been riding disc brakes if they would ever go back to V-brakes or cantilevers, and the response would be a unanimous and deafening “Hell no!”
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