What will it take to break carbon wheels?

Online bike forums are awash with horror stories about carbon wheelsets. We’ve heard many tales ourselves, usually of carbon wheels inexplicably imploding.

Yet, curiously, it’s hard to find anyone who’s actually experienced a major carbon failure of this nature.

That got us thinking, how hard is it to break carbon wheels? As it turns out, it’s very hard.

Alex Paton and Ollie Bridgewood subjected a pair of Winspace Hyper wheels to some pretty tough treatment in 2021, riding them down stairs and into curbs at breakneck speeds. No matter what they tried, the wheels resisted and remained perfectly intact.

Now Winspace has released new road and gravel wheels, the Lún MEGA and Lún GRAPIDs, and it claims that they’re even stronger than the Hyper wheels we previously failed to break. It's so confident that it dared us to have a go at breaking them.

It was another opportunity to test the weak carbon theory and one that we couldn’t miss. Only this time, there wouldn’t be any tame curbs and stairs. We wanted to go beyond the realms of road riding to really put the wheels through their paces.

For that, we recruited GMBN’s Blake Samson and a black mountain bike run. Would the combination be enough to break the wheels?