Zipp 404 NSW Carbon Disc-Brake Tubeless Rear Wheel

The Zipp 404 NSW Carbon Disc-Brake Tubeless Rear Wheel comes from a company that's been building carbon wheels since before most of the peloton believed in them. Zipp was founded in 1988 by motorsports engineer Leigh Sargent, and released the Zipp 3000 — the first three-spoke carbon wheel — the following year. That racing-first background still shows up in how Zipp engineers a wheel like the 404 NSW: not as a lightweight accessory, but as an aerodynamic tool built to a specific job. The rim runs a 58mm depth with a symmetrical carbon profile, hooked, at a 19mm internal width and 27mm max external width — proportions built around modern tubeless road tires rather than retrofitted to fit them.

The signature feature on the rim surface is Zipp's ABLC Sawtooth dimpling, a pattern of nodes across the rim's sidewall that functions on the same principle as the dimples on a golf ball. Air flowing over a smooth deep-section rim tends to separate from the surface at a certain point, creating a turbulent, energy-sapping wake behind the wheel. The Sawtooth dimples disrupt that airflow deliberately, at a frequency Zipp tuned to around 20 mph, generating smaller, more predictable vortices instead of one large unstable one. In practice, that shows up as a wheel that holds its line better in gusting crosswinds than a smooth-sided deep-section rim of the same depth — you spend less energy correcting your line and more energy actually moving forward.

The hub is Zipp's Cognition design, running on stainless steel cartridge bearings with a Center Lock disc interface, and this rear wheel is built with an XDR driver body, compatible with SRAM and Shimano 11-speed drivetrains. Rim construction uses UD carbon fiber finished with Zipp's Impress process. In its lightest configuration — 12mm thru-axle, XDR driver body — this rear wheel comes in at roughly 900 grams, part of a claimed 1,690-gram set weight when paired with the matching front wheel. It's tubeless-ready and rated to 125 psi maximum tire pressure, with a 250-lb system weight limit, and Zipp built it around 25mm-and-wider tubeless tires rather than the narrower clinchers deep-section wheels were originally designed around.

All of that adds up to a wheel built for exactly one job: holding speed on the road with as little compromise as possible. The 58mm depth is deep enough to make a real aerodynamic difference at race pace without pushing into the territory where a rim becomes hard to control in a crosswind, and the tubeless setup lets you run lower pressure for grip and comfort on rough pavement without giving up the low rolling resistance a deep carbon rim is built around. Zipp's motorsports-engineering roots and its decades of testing carbon wheels under professional racers, including Mark Allen's Ironman-winning rides on Zipp wheels as early as 1990, are the reason a wheel like this exists at all — building a rim shape that manages airflow instead of just cutting through it took real aerodynamic research, not a marketing department's guess.

This is a race wheel for riders who've already decided speed and stability at speed matter more than shaving the last few grams off a climbing wheel. Paired with a front 404 NSW or run alongside a different depth front wheel for a mixed setup, this rear wheel gives a road racer or triathlete the aerodynamic gain of a deep-section carbon rim without the twitchy handling that used to come with wheels this deep before Zipp started building crosswind stability directly into the rim shape.