Did you know that mountain bike brakes are hydraulic? I know, they don’t look it when they’re sitting on the shelf at your local bike store, but they’re not the cable-operated rim brakes of your youth — bicycle braking tech has come a long way, and it’s no longer all that dissimilar from what you’d find on a motorcycle. In fact, it’s so close that the biggest name in brakes is pushing its way into mountain biking: Brembo, which will now start working with Specialized on downhill brakes.
The MTB enthusiasts over at Pinkbike expected this, after seeing some unbranded brakes on a pro’s bike earlier this year, but now we’re finally getting details. Brembo will supply Specialized with brakes for its top-tier downhill race bikes, ridden by the Gravity team, for use through this year’s race season. The brakes are, of course, the Brembo color that makes stopping better: Red.
Red parts good
The Drive credits the partnership to Specialized’s years of working with Ohlins for suspension, a brand that Brembo bought earlier this year. Brembo also implied to The Drive that this was only a first step towards a larger entry into the MTB world, telling former Jalop Andrew Collins that “Brembo and Specialized have just embarked on a journey that we hope will lead to further innovations in the near future.”
Bicycles may be smaller, lighter, and slower than motorcycles or cars, but that doesn’t mean they don’t need precision brakes. In all my time on mountain bikes, I never found the raw strength of my Trek Marlin 7’s calipers to be an issue — the traction weak point was always my tires, but being able to feel where the tire starts to lock up requires brakes that transmit all the proper information to your fingertips. If Brembo can master that, then its Specialized collaboration will be more than just some red paint on race bikes. It may well mean a strong entry into the broader MTB world.
