This Iconic Italian Road Bike Brand Just Revived a Nearly Extinct Feature

On the downside, rim brakes are generally not as responsive as disc brakes, they are less reliable in wet conditions, brake pads can wear out more quickly (and put wear and tear on your bike’s rims), they don’t interact well with many carbon rims and, because steel brake cables suffer in corners, running them internally can leave the brakes themselves feeling spongy. Also, thanks to the recent dominance of disc brakes, good rim brake road bike wheels can be tricky to find.

Colnago C68 Rim Brake

But even with those disadvantages, rim brakes do offer a certain old-school charm that disc brakes can never hope to match. And Colnago, which actually introduced hydraulic disc brakes (the Colnago C59 Disc) on a road bike way back in 2013, knows better than anyone that before that time, rim brakes worked perfectly fine.

Which brings us to this unique new member of the brand’s C Series, rounding out a family that already includes the Road, Allroad, Ti and Gravel versions of the C68.

For the record, Colnago didn’t just slap a pair of rim brakes on the existing Road model. In order to make the platform work with rim brakes, a few changes had to be made.