DT Swiss has launched its latest Mon Chasseral, a tubeless-ready carbon clincher disc wheelset with a seriously low claimed weight of just 1,266g for a pair.
The Mon Chasseral name has been around since 2007 and, while the spec has evolved significantly, the underlying concept has always been the same.
It’s a high-end, low-profile wheelset where the focus is primarily on weight and climbing rather than aerodynamics.
In keeping with that theme, the name comes from DT Swiss’s “local mountain”, the 1,606m Chasseral in the Jura Mountains.
Why the asterisk in the headline? As we’ll get to, we’ve actually sort of seen these wheels before...
Carbon tubeless rims for the road
The latest Mon Chasseral is disc-only, with 24mm-deep carbon rims. The finish on the rims is what DT Swiss refers to as “out of the mold” [sic], which appears to mean there’s no extra finish applied to the naked carbon. It looks very slick, with fine unidirectional fibres on show.
DT Swiss doesn’t quote a rim weight, but it claims the Mon Chasseral is its “fastest accelerating wheel”, saving 15 per cent “rotational and translational energy” when accelerating from 0 to 30kph, compared to the PRC 1100 Dicut 35.
This is almost word-for-word the same claim DT Swiss made when it launched the PRC 1100 DICUT 25Y Edition last year and that’s because, according to the brand, the new Mon Chasseral is essentially a full production version of that very same wheelset.
(The claimed weight has dropped by a whopping 17 grams, suggesting a tweak has been made here or there.)
In any case, it’s hard to say what that means from a riding point of view because the carefully chosen wording suggests we’re talking about a very incremental gain in real terms. They’re very light, anyway.
It appears that both the front and rear rims are asymmetric for more even left–right spoke tensions and, like all DT’s road wheels, these are ready for tubeless tyres.
The press photos show a nifty valve setup with a cap that looks to double as a valve core removal tool. A nice touch.
If you’re thinking these wheels sound perfect for a super-lightweight gravel build, do note that they’re only 18mm wide internally. That would once have been considered wide, but it’s fairly conservative by current standards.
That’s because the Mon Chasserals are very road-focused in their design, and while larger tyres will doubtless fit (up to a point), DT Swiss recommends that you run these with 25s.
Slick hubs and straight-pull spokes with a difference
The Mon Chasserals have DT Swiss’s Dicut 180 hubs, with a Ratchet EXP freehub – the latest iteration of the brand’s proven star ratchet design that, arguably, is inherently more robust than more common pawl-based designs.
They’re available with standard freehubs (including SRAM XDR) and feature the same tool-free disassembly we’ve come to expect from DT Swiss.
Spokes are a core DT Swiss product and the Mon Chasserals are laced with a mixture of Aerolite and Aero Comp spokes, with 24 both front and rear.
While these are standard DT spokes in name, the ones used here are DT’s proprietary T-head version, as used on previous high-zoot off-the-peg wheelsets.
Unlike conventional straight-pull spokes, these can’t rotate at the hub end, which should ease wheel truing down the line. At the same time, it does mean spares may be less readily available.
At the rim end, the nipples are internal, making for a very clean look.
DT Swiss Mon Chasseral price and availability
The new Mon Chasserals are priced at £2,649.99 / €2,948 / $3,734, putting them within spitting distance of the rather more outlandish Corima MCC DXs announced last week.
They’re expected to be available in July but, as with all things just now, that may yet change.
