Free Speed On Your Mountain Bike? That Is What “BrakeAce” Promises

by | Jul 4, 2022 | Gear, Reviews & First Looks, Bike, First Look

We all dream of riding faster on our mountain bikes but is seems the time and effort required to make meaningful gains in fitness isn’t always realistic for our lifestyles! Strength and fitness are not the only influencing factors on your speed though, skill is of course a huge component and if there is one thing that the fastest riders in the world know how to do it is to slow down… very effectively!

Braking technique is highly underrated in everyday riding when it comes to looking for performance gains but Dr Matt Miller is trying to change that and make huge performance gains easily achievable with BrakeAce. This is a sensor that you attach to your bike between the brake callipers and their normal mounting points that will tell you how effective your braking is with easily understandable metrics and give you actionable advice on how to brake better and thus go faster without working harder. Sounds alright! Check out their kickstarter video below.

Brace Ace Kickstart Video

BrakeAce started as a research project with a tiny university budget and a ton of passion” you’ll read on their website. The team have now funded their first run of wireless BrakeAce sensors for consumers and are expecting to be shipping soon. The concept makes a lot of sense to us and the potential for this to profoundly change the way that we practice skill development on our mountain bikes is seems great! The application of BraceAce and the information it gives you would be relevant from downhill athletes looking to shave precious milliseconds off of their run to the cross country track where conserving momentum goes a long way to reducing the effort needed to stay on pace.

How Brakeace Will Make You Faster
The BrakeAce sensor is discreet and communicates wirelessly with the app. You will need to use a brake rotor that is 20mm bigger than the standard mount size on your bike ie: 200mm rotor if your fork is a 180mm brake mount standard.

I invented a brake sensor during my PhD and then spent five years researching how mountain bikers use their brakes on bike trails. I was coaching top riders around the world and we had a real need to understand how they brake so they could win more races. Understanding their fitness wasn’t enough. BrakeAce is the tool we wish we had.

DR Matt Miller

The concept is simple. Brake harder later for less time and you’ll be spending more time going fast. Brake dragging is also a plague on your attempts to carry speed down the trail and you often dint notice that you’re doing it. BrakeAce will point out where you are dragging your brakes and don’t need to be as well as coach you into better braking technique in heavy braking zones. It took a lot of work to assimilate the raw data into easily interpretable information but the team seem to have done just that. Have a look at some screenshots from the app.

Free Speed On Your Mountain Bike? That Is What &Quot;Brakeace&Quot; Promises
Log your rides with their braking data.
Free Speed On Your Mountain Bike? That Is What &Quot;Brakeace&Quot; Promises
Analyse your braking events and find the free speed

“Once you’re in the BrakeAce app, you can choose to view just your FlowScore as a simple way to compare your braking with friends or between different runs, or you can look at details of individual brake events across the trail. Custom algorithms analyze all of your braking events, and the app shows you the three places on the trail where you have the most room for improvement. These are called your Key Opportunities, and you can track your progress in the app where your rides are stored”

Brake Ace

The proof is in the pudding as always and this video below shows the potential to make huge performance gains!

Watch | BrakeAce In Action

How Brake Ace Makes You Faster

To learn more about Brake Ace and or even purchase it for yourself, check them out here: www.brakeace.com/

For more content like this, head on over to WILD AIR Sports.

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