Wheels

DT Swiss ERC 1100 Dicut wheelset

With a wide, mid-depth rim designed to be fast in all conditions, these endurance-focussed wheels are bang up to date

Finding the perfect wheelset can be a bit of a minefield when you’re into your road riding with a smattering of gravel thrown in for good measure. You need it to be able to cater for wider tyres, while being virtually bombproof as well as, ideally, quick rolling or aerodynamic and disc-brake specific. Such wheels that comprehensively tick all the boxes are hard to come by, but the DT Swiss ERC 1100 Dicut hoops give it a real go.

‘Dicut’ refers for DT Swiss’ performance arm, and they’ve gone to town to rival similar hoops from Zipp, ENVE, Hunt and Stan’s with these.

So, you get a mid-section full carbon rim that’s 47mm deep, along with an internal rim width of 19mm to ideally support 25c and 28c rubber. The resulting external rim width measures at 27mm, which provides a smooth transition from tyre to rim when fitted. It’s a design arrived at through a partnership with Swiss Side, led by ex-Formula One designer JP Ballard, who has spent more time in the wind tunnel than most.

When launched, we reported that Swiss Side developed a software calculation that allowed them to arrive at a selection of rim profiles for CFD analysis. The most promising profile was then built into a prototype for testing at the GST wind tunnel in Immenstaad, Germany, before arriving at the final design, whereupon prototype testing took place.

The resulting rim profile is in an up-to-date, NACA-inspired U-shape, which has the dual purpose of not only giving the vast bulk of performance gains in a wind tunnel, but also renders the hoops stable when the wind comes across you from a range of angles.

Back at the launch in December 2016, we were impressed with how well considered the wheels were down to the smallest details. Not only does the wider rim bed profile better support wider tyres, and ensure an aerodynamic profile between rim and rubber, it also means you are getting of comfort out of the wheelset.

This results in a wheel that has predictable and responsive handling characteristics too, teamed with DT Swiss’ new Aerolite 2/3 spokes that are said to give greater comfort through a more rounded, comfort-focussed profile nearer the hub before tapering to a bladed aero shape at the rim, so that they’ll still cut through the fastest moving air quickly.

Those spokes are laced to a new hubset, with a narrower axle diameter and narrow spoke flanges, to reduce drag by 0.4 watts over the regular Dicut hubset. Smooth rolling is guaranteed by ceramic bearings, all around a thru-axle setup.

DT Swiss ERC 1100 Dicut

Of course, they’re tubeless ready, too, which will allow lower pressures to be run while also potentially improving puncture protection. And, with the claimed weight coming in at 1,530g for a set of 47mm-deep wheels, you can be sure these wheels will perform when the road rises, as well as on rough terrain. When we rode the ERC 1100 Dicuts at launch, we were impressed across the board.

At the end of the day, these two-grand hoops are some of the best all-encompassing wheels we’ve ever encountered, and we expect wheel design from other big manufacturers to follow suit as we head through 2017.