“A disc brake has always been the best way of stopping a wheel so it seems logical to see a disc brake on a road bike and probably, in four or five years time, that’s what everybody will have and it will be the norm,” says Ian Alexander, chief designer at Whyte.
For Whyte, a Cotswolds-based brand best known for its mountain bike line-up but with a growing road range, disc brakes have always been the norm. “We’ve never done a caliper brake road bike and there’s never been a good reason to do one,” he says at the launch of Whyte’s 2015 range at the Lotus F1 Centre in Oxfordshire.
Disc brakes first appeared on mountain bikes in the mid-1990s and off-road riders have never looked back. Fast forward to 2014 and disc brakes are – slowly but surely – gaining, erm, traction in the road world and Whyte – like Saracen and their disc-equipped Arvo we brought you earlier this month – is among the mountain bike brands applying two decades of knowledge to skinny-tyred machines.
The result is Whyte’s new-for-2015 RRD range, made up of two disc-equipped, carbon-framed ‘thoroughbred road bikes’ designed for UK riding, and which follow the five-bike, aluminium RD-7 collection (which also includes a new carbon fibre machine) launched last year. But while the RD-7 range is aimed at the winter bike/fast commuter/light touring market, the two machines in the RRD line-up are more performance-focused, though Alexander’s reasoning for sticking with disc brakes remains the same.
“There is a misconception that disc brakes are more powerful,” he says. “That really isn’t the benefit, it’s the modulation of the power. It you ride in the Cotswolds, where there are 25 per descents, covered in moss, often wet – and most people will have encountered that sort of riding in the UK – then the reality is that with hydraulic disc brakes you can brake from the hoods with one finger. That means your weight isn’t moved all the way onto the front of the bike, you’re in control, you’re more relaxed, and the performance is so much better. Once you’ve done it, and then you go back to caliper brakes, it’s like night and day.”
We took a closer look at both the RRD and RD-7 ranges, as well as the CX collection, at Whyte’s 2015 get-together. Read on for more on each.
