HED Ardennes wheelset

Ardennes, Bastogne, Kermesse – if you think classic Belgian racing when you hear these words then we named them right. For us, these wheels evoke cobbles, the hard men of the spring classics, hard training, and serious racing. After 15 years of work staying on top of the aero wheel world, we turned our attention to traditional wheels. It seemed like a strange direction to go, but we got tired of looking at alloy wheels and thinking "these could be SO much better". They are, and we actually surprised ourselves by how much better they are.

Lighter? Yes. Stiffer? Got that one too. We planned for these two, but those two attributes by themselves were simply not enough. They needed more, so we designed a whole new rim to build them around, the Hed C2 rim. By obsessing over design, and with the modern miracle of CAD, the C2 rim is 23mm wide, and only 430g. Finally a rim has caught up to the advances that clincher tires have made in the past 2 decades.

But what makes 23mm better than the ubiquitous 19mm rim? Width. Picture a standard 23mm tire on the C2 rim. Tire and rim width are the same, the sidewalls are fairly straight, and the width of the rim spreads the tread contact patch out. With straighter sidewalls, and more rubber on the road, cornering is an entirely new experience. The sidewalls don’t flop over in a hard corner, and more rubber on the road is, well... better. C2s should be run with lower pressure, since there is more air volume in the wider tire profile. The same tire on a 19mm rim looks more like the profile of a light bulb. The curved sidewalls flop over under hard cornering, there is less rubber on the road, and more air pressure is needed to prevent pinch flats.

Read Cyclingnews.com's full review HERE