Having just recently purchased a disk brake mountain bike, I needed a decent rack for the rear to hang my panniers on. None of the other racks that I have laying around would fit, so I needed a disk brake compatible pannier rack.
After searching around a bit I located the Topeak Disk Brake Super Tourist Rack. Having used Topeak products and racks before, I knew this rack would be good quality. It’s an alloy rack, with some additional Topeak designs for their MTX range of bag mounting systems. It also has the dog leg at the end of the rack’s mounting legs to clear the disk brake.
Topeak Tourist Disk Compatible Rack
The rack came with full instructions and full hardware for mounting the rack to the bike. The top mounts are quite sturdy and strong unlike some other racks. The rack was supplied with all of the required mounting bolts, and even some different plastic fittings for rear light mounting systems.
Sturdy top mounts
View of the right hand dog leg mount
Rear light mount.
The rack also has Topeak’s MTX bag mounting system. I don’t have a Topeak rack top bag, to demonstrate, but it’s a system where the bag slides along the groove in the top of the rack (as seen in the above picture) and locks onto the rack at the front.
View of the left hand side near the disk brake.
It took me about ten minutes to fit this rack. Another design I like is the extra rail along the top of the rack, so that the pannier’s top mounting hooks actually mount to this rail instead of the top edge of the rack like most racks. On other racks the locking clips for the panniers stick into any rack top bag that I am using. This rack’s system is a lot better.
There are really only two things that I found that may be a problem. Firstly having snapped a lower rack mounting bolt once, the bolts for this rack are quite long to go through the dog leg. It’s going to be near impossible to find another set. Maybe Topeak could have supplied a spare set of lower disk mounting bolts.
The other problem that I found, which is not the rack’s fault, is that it is now impossible to mount the BOB trailer onto the bike because there is not enough room to be able to get the BOB trailer’s arms over and onto the skewer.
All in all, this rack is very well designed, and only time will tell how it stands up to off road riding with a load. However if it’s like other Topeak racks that I have used, I can’t see a problem. I give it a 9 out of 10 (no spare lower mounting bolts).
