Supadrive

The Supadrive system is our most reliable and fastest engaging drive system to date, which has won numerous World Championships in various disciplines. Find out why it comes as standard on our premium wheels in every discipline.

Wedge Pawl

The Supadrive uses a wedge pawl mechanism, featuring 3 pawls with 12 micro teeth on each pawl. The harder the system is engaged, the harder the pawls bite into the drive ring ensuring a strong engagement, especially under high torque loads such as those dished out by wide range cassettes and e-bikes.

As the pawls of the Supadrive system utilise 12 micro teeth per wedge the surface area is hugely increased compared to a conventional single tip pawl. This means that the pressure is spread over a greater surface area leading to more durability of the pawls and hub body. Conventional pawls need a much larger contact patch than the micro teeth used on the wedge pawls, as the force is effectively loaded through 1 tooth per pawl rather than 12 teeth. Therefore, the number of engagement points in our wedge pawl system can be much higher…

120 Points of Engagment

120 points of engagement is significant because it means that there is a maximum of 3 degrees of rotation between the rider engaging in the pedal stroke and the freehub body engaging. That’s almost instantaneous and you’d be challenged to notice it.

Fast engagement is critical in mountain biking, where last-second pedal strokes are the difference between staying upright and crashing. We developed the Supadrive with exactly that in mind.

Realising how well this worked for mountain bikers, we carried this design over successfully to our BMX hubs, Road hubs and Gravel hubs. For BMXers, this means that there is no compromise on the gate start. For Roadies, there’s no delay when sprinting out of corners and towards the line. For Gravel, pedalling becomes smoother because your freehub is engaged more when riding over the rough stuff.

Cr-Mo Body

The most recent improvement to our Supadrive hubs has been the switch to steel freehub bodies. Many rider will have experienced “Cassette bite” in alloy freehubs, and due to the advent of wider ranging cassettes (dinner-plates) and e-bikes the torque loads pushed through mountain bike drivetrains has increased significantly, exasperating the issue.

Alloy freehubs are lighter, but the material is weaker and more subject to denting than steel and this is where most cassette bite problems occur.

We have overcome the cassette bite problem by introducing steel freehub bodies on our latest Supadrive hubs. Although Alloy is lighter, we realised that the weight difference was 24g by switching from Alloy to Cr-Mo and consider that the benefits of less cassette bite outweigh the costs of the additional weight. Just remember that 24g is less than most teaspoons weigh.