The Hope Tech 3 X2’s consistency and its comfortable and highly-adjustable brake lever secures it as our favourite dual-piston disc brake.

>>> The best mountain bike disc brakes

Review by Charlie Collins

There’s a devoted following for Hope products, all designed, built and tested in the UK. Their CNC machined manufacturing method is fairly unique in the world of braking, and the quality is exquisite.

The drilled lever blade shape has a great tactile feel and on every pull it consistently bites right where you set it to. There’s also an option to go lighter with their Race Evo lever, but this has less adjustment to it.

Housed within the one piece machined caliper are some organic pads as standard. In the wet conditions, we struggled to achieve as much braking power in comparison to the Shimano XT, but this also proved similar with SRAM’s Level TLM too. Switching from the stock pads to sintered alternatives boosted power, but still wasn’t quite as much grab as the competition – being closer to an XC brake though, this was to be expected.

When you buy into Hope’s products, you could consider it an investment. Amazing spare parts backup and rebuildable at home means they could easily go on to outlast many other components on your bike, we just wish they had a little more oomph.