WHEELS OF CHANGE

Enve’s take on the disc brake revolution

With the prospect of disc brakes becoming standard across the road bike scene, Enve has a potential challenge ahead of it to redesign its wheel range to accommodate disc rotors.

‘We’re watching the market carefully – we’ll be ready either way,’ says Enve CEO Sarah Lehman. Given the centralised operation of the company, Enve is often quick to respond to shifts in the market. With a background in carbon mountain bike wheels, Enve has already released some road disc wheels. ‘The 3.4 disc will look a lot like our mountain wheels but limited to a three-cross spoke pattern.’

Joe Stannish, director of manufacturing, adds, ‘We looked at how those loads are transferred, and developed our wheel based on that. Even though our 3.4 disc wheel is a similar shape to the 3.4 rim brake wheel it’s a completely different animal. It’s about 30g lighter per rim.’

That said, Stannish argues that he doesn’t see an immediate need for discs compared to Enve’s rim brake models. ‘There’s always room for improvement in terms of managing heat, but we feel very strongly about how our wheels handle heat.’

Co-owner Brett Satterthwaite also has mixed feelings on the shift. ‘For me and for the hills here, I like the idea of the disc brake, but I can see that for team races there are challenges – rotor diameters, switching wheels and so on.’ Satterthwaite believes that more could be done to unify carbon rims before resorting to discs, too. ‘I think there could be a standard that could be put out so that carbon wheels have to have a certain coefficient of braking.’