Originally Posted by
Dave Mayer
Actually, discs are a competitive disadvantage, unless you are racing in some kind of made-up event which involves filling your panniers with bricks and tearing down long descents in the rain. Check the embarrassing results in the last Olympic road race... despite what must have been intense sponsor pressure, and the number of riders not on discs being reduced to less than 10, 2 of the 3 podium spots were captured by the Luddites on rim brakes.
Tubulars? to be more precise, tubulars are not 'popular', but at the highest levels of the sport, they are exclusively used by every rider on every stage in every race. Road, track, cross and even MTB. Again, the purpose of the bike industry is to sell new expensive stuff to dentists with gold cards, and weekend warriors do not want to deal with the 'mess' of gluing tires. The industry really does not want to manufacture tubular gear for tiny group that gets their stuff for free. However, clinchers are so performance and safety disadvantaged that they will never 'catch up' to tubulars, and the bike industry reluctantly has to keep making this stuff to win races.
BTW: the insurmountable problem with clinchers is not the tires, but the inferior rim profile. Heavy, fragile, causes pinch flats, poor at distributing heat, and is susceptible to excess tire inflation pressures.
The thing with disc brakes is that they are actually more of a benefit to the average rider than they are to the pro-peloton. Road disc brakes first started to gain popularity on endurance focused bikes (where braking function is more important than weight) before making their way onto full-on race bikes. Super-lightweight climbing race bikes being the last to make the switch for obvious reasons. So disc brakes are essentially a ground-up development and now at a stage where they are "competitive" on pretty much any bike. "Big Bike" doesn't need pro cycling to endorse disc brakes, they endorsed themselves before they even made it into the pro-peloton.
If anything it's rim brakes that are now barely clinging on due to a few pro teams still using them. In the last couple of years rim brakes have almost become an elitist badge item to say I'm "real pro" and not a "dentist with a gold card" disc brake muppet, LOL.