Wrong reason! I use to live in S California and rode a lot of mountain roads from San Bernardino National Forest mountains to Idyllwild area to Angeles National Forest mountains to Los Padres National Forest mountains and never had an issue with rim brakes and neither did any of my racing and riding buddies. But so what you scream? will then don't consider what I've done instead consider all the pro racers who raced faster than I did down steeper mountain roads than I did all over Europe for many many years and never did mass pro riders go plummeting off those mountain roads due to "bad" rim brakes, in fact I could not find one incident where a pro racer lost his life due to brake failure. In fact you take a good chance of frying your hub bearings from the heat of the disk!
All I'm saying is that using the excuse of riding in a mountainous area is pure rubbish to buy disk brakes, you bought into a bunch of hype is all you've done. Now there is an issue with carbon wheels that could get too hot and rim brakes go into a fade type of problem, or the rims delaminate which supposedly has been cured by name brand CF wheels, not so much for the cheap generic Chinese made ones.
Also don't buy into the marketing hype you can stop faster with disk brakes vs rim brakes because it simply is not true. The real factor in how fast you stop is entirely wrapped up in tire adhesion to the road, and in that involves the tire, PSI, road surface, weather conditions, rider and bike weight. A friend and I got into this one time when he told me that dual pivot brakes that he has stop faster than my old style single pivot (remember that debate? similar to this one!) We discovered that they both stopped in the same distance even with us using different tires but same 23 width (we even swapped bikes to see if a different rider would have different result). If any of you have disk brakes and knows someone with rim brakes that use the same width tires try the experiment and see for yourself.
You've obviously never ridden the new Shimano hydro discs. I don't own them, but I've spent some time on them and they are more powerful. And you can use it. With less effort and fantastic control. I'm not on a mission to get a new bike that has them, but holy sh*t...they really work well.
It's the same argument you see w/ cars and motorcycles. The armchair physists saying that if you have enough power to lock up the wheel, you can't stop any quicker no matter what you do. You don't need any more power if you can lock up the wheel.
It's really complete crap. Every new car and motorcycle generation has had more powerful brakes that are
more easily modulated. That's the key element...more control. You are definitely limited by traction, but if you have more power that is easily controlled, you will be able to slow down more consistently all the way down a descent and also for multiple descents.
There is no way in hell I'd ride a bike w/ BRS200 brakes when I could ride one w/ hydro discs. Sure, they'll both lock up the wheel, but you're completely brain dead if you can't see the advantage of the better brake.
Look at CX racers. They'd be the last guys on earth you'd think would want or need disc brakes. Not much traction...pretty moderate speeds...very few if any descents at all. But despite all that, probably 80% of the elite cx racers in the US are using disc brake bikes. Huh. Wonder why?
