Market: At least since the UCI officially allowed disc brakes in the WorldTour at the beginning of this year, Campagnolo has been under pressure - while the competition from SRAM and Shimano have long had working disc stoppers in their range, things have looked bleak for the traditional Italian manufacturer so far. Now a working prototype was shown for the first time, but also explained why the market launch is still a long time coming.
Movistar, Lotto Soudal, Astana – these three WorldTour teams use components from Vicenza and have had to do without the 'disc brakes' option so far. Especially during the classic season that is about to start, we will undoubtedly see one or the other top driver with disc brakes. Surprisingly, there may also be a rider from the teams just mentioned among them - because, as Campagnolo confirmed at the press camp a week ago, they already have working prototypes that are already being tested by the pros.
The interface between the Italian manufacturer and the professional teams is the newly founded Campy Tech Lab: Without much effort and without cumbersome bureaucracy, professionals and teams can forward their feedback to this group of developers and engineers, who in turn incorporate the findings into the further development process. Even if you have had very good experiences working with professionals at Campagnolo in the past, you cannot and do not want to rely solely and solely on their feedback.
Safety tests, resilience tests and long-term experience are elementary components in the development of new components and at Campagnolo they don't want to be put under pressure by either the world association or the industry. Only when a component is "Campagnolo Corretto" - i.e. has successfully passed all tests - does one think of mass production and market launch. For these reasons, people are keeping a low profile for the moment as far as the official introduction of the disc brake is concerned.
Nevertheless: One or the other training bike of the pros is already being tested diligently and racing use is certainly not excluded. So it's doubly worth keeping an eye out for the Movistar, Astana and Lotto Soudal team bikes over the coming weeks and months - it certainly wouldn't be too much of a surprise to spot one of the prototypes there.