Cycling is a funny old sport really. It exists in this Goldilocks zone where the genuine top-end, race-ready gear is still relatively accessible when viewed in the context of other sports like sailing or motorsport. For under £2k, you can upgrade your bike with some of the best road bike wheels from the bleeding edge of the aerodynamic frontier, the equivalent, I presume, to slapping the front wing of Lewis Hamilton’s Mercedes F1 car to your VW Golf (can you tell I’m not a motorsport fan?). The slightly wordy Hunt 48 Limitless UD Carbon Spoke Discs, hereby abbreviated to the Limitless 48 UD, occupy the top shelf of the brand’s mid-depth wheels. At 48mm deep they’re looking to satisfy a more all round role, with the deeper 60 Limitless UD catering more to the crit exclusive crowd.
I’ve had these on the go since the end of last year. They’ve come with me on my Canyon Ultimate, and when that went back to Koblenz they were swiftly swapped over to my new long-termer, a Fairlight Strael. I’ve blasted around on blue sky days and braved some ferocious Cornish crosswinds too, and I’m finally ready to pass judgement.
Design and aesthetics
I first set eyes on these over a beer at Eurobike last year. A ragtag bunch from Hunt, devoid of a stand, were roaming the frankly bewildering halls of the conference centre with some wheel bags. The thing that struck me about the 48 Limitless UDs then was the same thing that struck me when the box arrived at my home last year: “Bloody hell, these are wide!”.
A 22.5mm internal width is wide, even by the increasingly expanding modern sensibilities. The most obvious feature isn’t the internal width though, it’s the external width. At 34.5mm wide these are noticeably wider than anything else I’ve seen, ridden, or anything else on the market I’d wager. The widest point isn’t even at the tyre-rim interface, but 10mm or so lower down, meaning that with a 28c tyre, the whole system neatly expands out and then contracts to the apex, which is a thoroughly modern U-shape, though given the width it’s a more pronounced, bulbous look than the competitors.
The width does mean that the rim is noticeably wider than the tyre. Looking down at your front wheel dead on while riding and seeing the rim is certainly novel, and while it claims aero advantages (which we will get to shortly) it has an unintended side effect. Leaning your bike up…
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at CyclingNews RSS Feed…