Everything breaks at some point - and road bike wheels are no exception. With classically built wheels, worn rims or hubs can still be inexpensively replaced and re-spoked together with the well-preserved rest; with the now very widespread system wheels, however, rim cracks, broken spokes or broken hub flanges can mean ruin if spare parts are too expensive or cannot be obtained at all. Nevertheless, there are good reasons for the unbroken triumph of system wheels: They are light, stiff, aerodynamic and look good.
They all work perfectly when new, but the true quality only becomes apparent over the course of many thousands of kilometres. Finding this out in an endurance test is almost impossible - but we tried anyway. We tested wheels with aluminium rims priced between 289 and 1,069 euros. The major manufacturers Mavic, Shimano, DT Swiss, Easton, Campagnolo and Fulcrum each entered the race with two sets; the less common suppliers Citec, HED, Ritchey and Zipp each sent one model into the race. We have focussed on models that are widely used and ridden a lot - either as original equipment in standard bikes or as retrofit kits.
You can find out how these wheels performed and what values we measured in the PDF download below:
- Campagnolo Eurus
- Campagnolo Scirocco
- Citec 3000 Classic
- DT Swiss RR21 Dicut
- DT Swiss R 1700 Tricon
- Easton EA70
- Easton EA90 RT
- Fulcrum Racing 1
- Fulcrum Racing 3
- HED Ardennes LT
- Mavic Ksyrium Elite S
- Mavic Ksyrium SLS
- Ritchey Zeta WCS
- Shimano WH-RS61
- Shimano WH-RS80-C24-CL
- Zipp 30
The picture gallery for the test:
Downloads:
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