If you thought rim-brakes were dead and buried, think again. Or, as Parcours’ tagline goes, think wider. Parcours, one of the most progressive wheel brands out there, might have just saved them from extinction with its new Grimpeur. Weighing 1,295g and featuring a wide rim that’s optimised for 28mm tyres, the British brand promises “the perfect modern all-rounder for a rim-brake setup”. And at £1,099 the price is competitive too.
As someone who owns a few made-to-measure and classic rim-brake bikes that I plan to keep forever, I made a beeline for Parcours’ HQ in the Surrey Hills to find out more. Not only that – I wanted to go for a ‘save the rim brake’ ride on the new Grimpeurs with Parcours founder Dov Tate.
First of all, the obvious question – why? Aren’t rim brakes supposed to be dead? “There are a lot of rim-brake bikes out there and some of them need a little bit of love,” says Tate. “But just because you have a rim-brake bike doesn’t mean you don’t want to be a modern rider running wider tyres – and you need a modern rim to be able to do that. Increasingly we’re seeing that tyre manufacturers are developing their 28mm tyres around a wider rim, so if you’re fitting it to an older generation-wheel that has a 19mm or even 17mm internal rim width it’s not going to be the shape it was designed to be.”
He is talking about those diagrams of lightbulb-shaped tyre-rim profiles, where the narrow rim pinches in the tyre sidewalls and the carcass bulges above it like a cactus that’s outgrown its flowerpot. The new Parcours Grimpeur has a 22.5mm internal rim width and a 27.9mm external width at the brake track, making it compatible with the latest – or in the cases of the higher-end groupsets, the last – rim-brake calipers. On the Grimpeurs I’m testing, I’ve installed a pair of fresh new Vittoria Corsa Pro 700x28, and the tan sidewall transitions smoothly into the rim in a continuous line exactly as it should. But it’s not just about the aesthetics – it’s a better shape for aerodynamics, handling and grip.
Tate explains: "We applied what we’d learnt from our disc-brake wheels, asked how far we could push that design on a rim-brake wheel whilst maintaining compatibility. We realised that we could push a bit further than we had in the past, in particular with the internal rim width, so we’ve gone from the previous generation of 19mm to 22.5mm. It might not sound like a lot, but it’s a generational leap in terms of rim design. We’ve done what we did around disc brakes: we have a shallow wheel with a wider rim which has the benefits of lower weight and better handling, but the aero performance of a previously deeper rim. The aero headline on the Grimpeur is that with an older 25mm tire it’s marginally slower than the Parcours Passista, which is our mid-depth rim-brake wheel [56mm rim height, 19mm internal rim width], but when you compare them with a 28mm tire, it’s actually faster because of the wider rim.”
It sounds very impressive, but does Tate think there’s enough of a rim-brake market left to make it worth the investment? “There is a gap here – it might not be the biggest market and it might not be growing rapidly but certainly for a business of our size and scale there is enough there to make it worthwhile and frankly almost nobody else is doing this.”
Is there anything similar out there like this for rim-brake bikes? “Not that I’m aware of. There are some rim-brake wheels available, maybe not from mainstream brands, that are a bit wider than previous generations, but certainly the bigger brands have completely moved away from it. Speak to any bike manufacturer and they’re hardly selling any rim-brake bikes, but what we do see is people porting over old components. People have got a nice rim-brake groupset – A Super Record, Dura-Ace or SRAM Red – that they want to keep using on a more up-to-date frame; maybe they want to run a 28mm instead of a 23mm tyre. The other thing about a rim-brake wheel is that it does have a finite life: you wear through the braking surface and when that happens you want to be able to replace and upgrade. And just because you’re riding rim brakes, you don’t have to be stuck in that new-old stock world.”
OK. But will they fit? When I arrived Tate told me about an indignant message through the Parcours website from someone accusing him of making a rim-brake wheel that would never fit a real-world rim-brake bike. But once assured directly that the Grimpeur would work, the accuser became a customer. However, it’s true that there are very real design constraints, so where did Parcours start with the Grimpeur’s design?
“You start with the constraints of an external rim width that has to fit inside the brake caliper. All of the latest generation of rim brake calipers quote a 28mm clearance, so we set our external width for 27.9mm – a little bit of tolerance but not much. The external lets you find the internal and we got to 22.5mm, which marries up with our road disc-brake range, which is all 22.5mm internal and optimised around that 28 to 30mm tyre. Obviously on a rim-brake bike you might not get a 30 in there but for a 28 that works really nicely. You’ve also still got the option of a 25mm complying with ETRTO, so if your frame only clears 25 but your caliper clears a 28 you can still run a 25mm tyre on a more modern rim profile.
“From there we looked at the rim depth and asked, based on testing for our disc-brake line, what would be the best balance with those dimensions? You need a rim to be deep enough to start to capture airflow coming off the leading edge of the tyre, but equally we knew that we wanted to keep the weight down, because one of the benefits of rim-brake set-ups still is that they’re super light. So we put it through the CFD iteration and that’s how we came out at the 41mm rim depth.”
Construction
With a count of 20 bladed steel spokes in the front and 24 in the rear, the Grimpeurs supply, in Tate’s words, a “nice balance… lightweight but also robust and because we’re not going have a vast array of rim brake options in the future, it has to be a good all-rounder, versatile enough to cover a lot of different use cases.”
As for the rim layup and construction, Parcours hasn’t changed the formula from what Tate says works to give it the right characteristics. The brake track is the high-temperature resin and textured braking surface for added grip that Parcours has used before, and the wheels come with carbon-specific brake pads. “I genuinely don’t believe that there's much more optimisation to be done with the braking, because it’s a very mature technology. The first carbon clincher was in the early 2000s and well over 20 years of development have gone into it; there haven’t been any huge leaps forward there even though it’s true there hasn’t been much investment in it in the last five years. Anyway, we’ve seen it in testing that in the vast majority of cases the limiting factor in traction is your tyre.”
The hubs also get an upgrade to Parcours’ new star ratchet drive mechanism featuring a 36-tooth ratchet ring that gives a 10° engagement angle. This represents, according to Parcours, a great balance between high engagement and durability. The sound of the freehub – always something to consider – is not as silent as certain Shimano models but it’s not swarm-of-angry-bees loud either. It’s perfectly possible to continue the conversation with your ride mate while you’re freewheeling.
The rims are of course hooked and tubeless compatible – Tate has told me in the past that he considers hookless is better suited to gravel wheels with bigger-volume tyres and lower pressures with minimal chance of blowoff – but my personal preference with road tyres is tubes, so I set up the Grimpeurs with Vittoria TPU tubes with their distinctive red valves to match the red in Vittoria’s branding on the Corsa Pro sidewalls.
Ride impressions
The Vittoria Corsa Pros went on with fingers only – no need for levers and only a minimal amount of wrestling with the last bit. Although I was running tubes with them so it's cheating, they still seated very easily with a couple of satisfyingly loud pops, and then looked perfect.
Obviously it’s essential to use the supplied brake pads, not necessarily to protect the wheels but because the carbon braking surface destroys regular brake pads, turning them into black dust instead of gripping them.
The Ultegra R8000 groupset I have on my Racer Rosa includes those more modern brake calipers Tate was talking about, and there was loads of clearance for the wider rims and the 28mm tyres. The caliper wasn’t even fully open when I clamped the cable. It could take an even slightly wider rim if necessary, without losing mechanical advantage. When the Racer Rosa frame was made for me in 2019, the brand’s owner Diego Lombardi said it was good for 25mm tyres and neither of us imagined we’d ever need wider. But here we are in 2025 and it turns out the frame was nicely futureproofed – there’s a good 3-4mm of clearance in the chainstays with the 28mm Corsa Pros on the Grimpeurs. There’s also plenty in the Columbus Futura fork.
I was excited to ride the Grimpeurs and I still look forward to going out on them several rides later. Obviously running superfast tyres always helps, but they feel lightweight, nimble, responsive and… just fast. The whole system works incredibly well. And they are perfect for the aluminium Racer Rosa which, despite all the assumptions about aluminium in the past, is not at all harsh. They only give it an even more nuanced ride. It is stiff, racy, pretty light at 7.6kg (now 200g lighter than it was) and the Grimpeurs are the perfect match. Uphill and accelerating, they are noticeably fast. They’re called ‘Grimpeur’ for a reason. Thanks to the reasonably shallow rim depth they don’t get caught by gusts of wind – they are inherently practical in all situations.
What's more, and this might sound incredible to some, braking performance is excellent. We joked at the start of our first ride that we hoped we'd be able to stop on our rim brakes, but we needn't have worried (we didn't). There was plenty of power, obviously modulation is more down to finessing the brake levers than with disc brakes, but sometimes you do wonder what the fuss was all about.
Conclusion
Even though I’ve been impressed by how light, stiff and fast they are, probably the audience for the Grimpeur wheels won’t be the racer trying to squeeze every last watt out of a wheel’s performance. “I think it will be more the connoisseur,” says Tate. “For example, you have a rim-brake Pegoretti that you’re going to ride forever… there are lots of beautiful, beautiful rim-brake bikes out there that people are going to love and cherish. It will be the ones with a soul that stay on the road for a long time. We’re saying to those people that they don’t have to make do with old technology. This is the first rim-brake wheel we’ve launched in six years, so we’ve got another six years of knowledge of development behind us. It may be that this is the last rim-brake wheel we launch, so we wanted to make sure it was the best we can do. It’s a generational leap within constraints.”
I really hope it’s not the last rim-brake Parcours launches, but it’s hard to see how it could be any better – within those constraints that Tate mentions regularly. Unless your rim-brake bike is one that has to be period correct with metal rims and 32 spokes, these wheels will breathe life back into it. I pronounce the rim brake officially saved.
For more information go to Parcours website.
Specification
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Rim depth – 41mm
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Rim width at brake track – 27.9mm
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Max rim width – 29.5mm
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Internal rim width – 22.5mm
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Hub – Parcours road rim
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Weight – 1,295g (actual on the scales 1,323g with tape)
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Spokes – Alpina Ultralight
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Spoke lacing – front radial/rear 2-cross
- Price – £1,099
