The Last Alloy Wheels At The Hell Of The North: Why Pros Still Ran Aluminium Rims At Paris-Roubaix Long After The Carbon Revolution
On Sunday morning in Compiègne, every bike on the Paris-Roubaix start line will roll out of the team bus on a pair of deep-section carbon wheels. Not a single WorldTour team is confirmed to be running aluminium rims in 2026 — not Alpecin-Deceuninck, not UAE Team Emirates-XRG, not even the smallest Continental wildcards. That would not have been true ten years ago. It would not have been true five years ago. For most of the 2010s, the rider who won the Hell of the North was statistically more likely to have done it on alloy than on carbon, and there are service-course anecdotes from Mavic and Shimano technicians about pros refusing to touch the carbon rim even after their team sponsors had stopped making anything else.
The last rider to win Paris-Roubaix on an alloy rim, depending on how you count, is Greg Van Avermaet in 2017, riding the Mavic Cosmic Pro Carbon SL UST — a carbon fairing over a structural aluminium rim bed, the old compromise wheel that let riders get a deep-section aerodynamic profile without trusting their race to a full-carbon hookless tubular at 3.8 bar over the Trouée d'Arenberg. Strictly speaking, the rim Van Avermaet won on was half alloy. The last full-alloy winner is Mathew Hayman in 2016, who took the longest sprint finish in Roubaix history on a pair of Shimano Dura-Ace C24 clinchers that his mechanic had built up himself out of the service-course parts bin because the full-carbon tubulars the rest of the team was running had all cracked in the Compiègne warm-up.
The reason pros held on to alloy for so long was not aerodynamics and it was not weight. It was the spoke bed. A carbon rim of the 2010-2018 era was laid up as a single structural piece with the nipple bed integrated into the layup, which meant that when a rider hit a square-edged cobble hard enough to seat the tyre against the rim wall, the spoke tension on that wheel could redistribute in a way that cracked the rim from the inside out. Mavic kept selling aluminium-walled race wheels to WorldTour teams specifically for Paris-Roubaix until 2019. Shimano's Dura-Ace C40 launched in 2020 with an advertised cobble-specific carbon layup and a new three-year warranty that covered Roubaix-specific impact damage — the first carbon wheel from a major manufacturer to do so.
The tyre story runs parallel. Until 2019 the cobbled classics were still a tubular race — Vittoria Pavé, FMB Paris-Roubaix Pro, Dugast Paris-Roubaix Cotton — glued to alloy-walled rims because the sealing chemistry of tubeless just was not there yet for a full day of impact. The tyre-to-rim bond was the rider's only real safety margin on a Roubaix cobble, and a badly-glued carbon-walled tubular was a rider's worst Sunday afternoon. The switch to 28mm and then 30mm hookless tubeless between 2020 and 2022 was what finally killed the alloy wheel at Roubaix, because the hookless tubeless interface needs a precisely-machined carbon bed that alloy simply cannot match.
The quiet moment the transition was complete came in 2023. Sonny Colbrelli's 2021 win was on a full-carbon Fulcrum Speed 40T. Mathieu van der Poel's 2023 win was on full-carbon Shimano Dura-Ace C36, the 2024 on C50, the 2025 on C50 again. When Alpecin-Deceuninck service course manager Christoph Roodhooft was asked in a Compiègne press conference two years ago whether his team still had alloy wheels in the truck, he said: "We have one pair. They are not for racing. They are for the junior team visit on Tuesday morning."
There is one technical detail that still matters in 2026, though, and it is the reason the final hour of every Roubaix team presentation includes a mechanic quietly measuring the internal rim width of every wheel going on the start line. Modern 32mm hookless tubeless rims with a 25mm internal width run at measurably lower pressures than the 19mm internal widths of the carbon-alloy hybrids from the late 2010s. Mads Pedersen's 4.0 bar front pressure — the softest ever confirmed on a Roubaix start line — is only possible because of the rim geometry. Pedersen would not have survived the Trouée on a 2016 Shimano C24 at 4.0 bar. Hayman, in 2016, ran 5.8 bar.
So the alloy wheel did not lose to carbon because carbon was faster. It lost because the tyre changed, and the tyre could only change because the rim changed, and the rim could only change because the layup changed. Ten years ago the most conservative wheel choice in professional cycling was an aluminium-walled deep-section rim glued to a tubular tyre. On Sunday morning in Compiègne, the most conservative wheel choice in professional cycling is a 50mm hookless carbon rim running a 32mm Lidl-Trek-branded Continental GP5000 S TR at 4.0 bar front, 4.1 bar rear. The conservative choice moved. The Hell of the North did not.