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Italian component maker Fulcrum started as a way for Campagnolo, best known for its drivetrains, to sell wheels that would neatly blend in with both Shimano and SRAM drivetrains. 20 years later, the company has been busy overhauling its road lineup with solid, if conservative wheels. The new Fulcrum Sharq wheels feel like a real change-up in comparison, a wheel that distinctly stands out not only for its ride quality, but for its looks and spec sheet.
Fulcrum says the new Sharq wheels are its first product designed for road, all-road, and gravel. With that territory comes a hooked rim with a 25 mm internal rim width, the latter a first for the brand. The Sharq also features a 2-Wave rim design, a wave-shaped rim that promises excellent stability in crosswinds.
Products designed to run the gamut between road and gravel often feel compromised, stuck between two things and never succeeding at one specific thing. Fortunately, the Sharq wheels avoid that unhappy medium.
Quick hits: Six things to know about the Fulcrum Sharq wheels
- Sharq features a mini-hook rim and Fulcrum’s Two-Way bead tubeless profile with an undrilled rim.
- The rim features a two-wave rim profile offering depths between 42 mm and 47 mm.
- Fulcrum claims up to 8 percent less aero drag than other wave-shaped rims and up to 20 percent better crosswind stability than a standard rim profile.
- Claimed weight: 1440 grams.
- Price: $ 2,807/€2,460/£ 2,289
- For more: fulcrumwheels.com
What is the Sharq?
The Fulcrum Sharq is fairly easy to spot in a crowd, at least based on how Mattia De Marchi rode them at Unbound Gravel. It’s the distinctive wave-like profile Fulcrum offers–not unlike a sawtooth, huh?–that makes these wheels different from others, at least visually.
The rim shape starts with a symmetric wave profile at the spoke bed: 47 mm deep rims at the deepest point and 42 mm at its most shallow. Move toward the sides of the rim, however, and you see that the rim shape is asymmetric, with an aggressive taper from the base of the curve before tapering off more slowly out back. It’s that asymmetric wave that Fulcrum says optimizes the rim for crosswind stability.
Fulcrum’s testing says that with yaw angles between zero and 10 degrees, the 2-wave rim design offers 21 percent better stability. In crosswinds between 10 and 20 degrees, the Sharq’s rim profile is a claimed 29 percent more stable.
Not all of that performance can be attributed to the rim profile, at least according to Fulcrum. The Sharq wheels also adopt a new steel spoke profile called ‘A3RO,’ with a 3 mm width and 0.8 mm thickness. The 24 straight-pull spokes per wheel cross one another but don’t touch, which Fulcrum says allows the spokes to maintain proper tension for longer without the creaking that can sometimes come from anodized black spokes. Further, the spoke is ovalized at the head to prevent it from spinning as you adjust spoke tension.
Fulcrum is one of the few hub companies to stick to its tried-and-true Ultra Smooth Bearings (USB) system. USB consists of a cup and cone bearing system using angular-contact hybrid ceramic bearings that Fulcrum says are 50 percent smoother than smooth bearings. This is paired with Fulcrum’s standard 36-tooth freehub for a standard 10 degrees of engagement.
While I can’t test it, the aluminum hubs spin with silky smoothness, both in the stand and on the road.
One unique bit about Fulcrum’s hubs is that while they accept Centerlock rotors, they don’t use a standard internally threaded lockring. Rather, Fulcrum–and Campagnolo–place the threads externally and use a larger own lockring. According to Fulcrum, this allows for larger, more durable bearings inside the hub and wider bearing spacing, again for improved durability.
Just make sure you have a Park BBT-9 or a deep socket that offers enough room to tighten the lockring around the hub’s large aluminum axle, as many bottom bracket tools won’t offer enough clearance to tighten Fulcrum’s lockring.
The Fulcrum Sharq features a 25 mm internal rim width (30 mm external) with the brand’s mini-hook rim design. This allows for the use of both clincher and tubeless-ready tires alike so long as you’re using a minimum 30 mm wide tire; Fulcrum suggests the use of up to a 42 mm wide tire for gravel. Further, the rim bed is undrilled, with just a single hole for a valve, negating the need for rim tape.
Fulcrum claims a lack of spoke holes means the wheels should be stronger and more durable. I think that replacing spokes and spoke nipples might be a bit more of a challenge, but the overall result is a wheel that sets up tubeless without the use of fussy rim tape.
Out of the box, the Fulcrum Sharq is claimed to weigh in at 1,440 grams. Our test set weighed 1,448 grams with a SRAM XDR freehub. That makes them heavier than the Zipp 353 NSW it shares a similar wavy rim profile as well as an ENVE SES 3.4. But neither of those has ceramic bearings or a hooked rim profile that more folks seem to be going after.
Riding the Fulcrum Sharq
The Fulcrum Sharq wheels I had on order arrived true and with roughly equal tension in the spokes side-to-side. In my time with them on road, gravel, and singletrack, the wheels stayed true, and spoke tension remained roughly the same. That’s a great start, but Fulcrum’s wheels have traditionally done a good job of staying true in the long term.
Fulcrum’s 2-Way Fit tubeless rim also generally makes tubeless tire setup fairly easy. While Fulcrum suggests brushing down the tire and rim hooks with soapy wire to facilitate seating the tire, I didn’t need to do that. Interestingly, every tire I tried to set up–between a myriad of 30 mm road tires up to a 42 mm gravel tire–did so easily with a floor pump.
Miraculously, most of them even seated using a standard Silca Tattico hand pump, which bodes well for mid-ride tubeless repair. This ease of use should be the standard at which almost every rim and tire brand tries.
Unlike Fulcrum’s other wheels, the Sharq wheels have standout numbers on the spec sheet. It’s not weight or stiffness, but rather crosswind stability. Fulcrum offered up some test data that shows up to three unnamed competitors, with the Sharq outperforming them the rowdier the wind direction became.
The numbers bear out nicely in the real world: these wheels ride like much more shallow wheels when the going gets windy. You don’t get the tugging that still happens with some deeper road wheels, allowing me to better focus on finding the right line through a corner on a descent. I’d say they’re every bit as stable in crosswinds as the 32 mm gravel wheels I swapped from, and more stable in crosswinds than other 40 mm + road wheels.
Ride quality can be best described as forgiving. The wheels rode smoothly on rough surfaces regardless of what tire I used. They don’t quite feel as stiff as the best road bike wheels, but they’re still plenty stiff on the road bike, and enough that I wouldn’t have any qualms running them on a fast road bike.
The same can be said for using the Sharq wheels on a gravel bike: they’re forgiving. On dirt, the wheels feel responsive and tight. They’re not cushy like a lower-profile gravel wheel, but you wouldn’t expect them to be, either. Rather, they feel, quick, tight, and eager out there, and plenty grippy on
As good as the numbers suggest with these Fulcrum wheels, I suspect their looks are the deciding factor in choosing these wheels over the competition. The wavy shark fin rim profile looks good stationary and fast while moving, but the finishing is top notch too. The Direct Inmold Matt Finish (DIMF) means the rims come out of the mold with the marbled carbon finish. But like Fulcrum’s Speed wheels, I quite like the laser etching they used to place the wheel details discreetly on the rim.
I’m sure you were waiting for the downside here, right? Can you guess what it is? No, it’s not price, as I think these wheels actually match what the competition offers at a similar price point, especially in just how confidence-inspiring these wheels feel as the speeds increase.
Rather, it’s the warranty. Fulcrum offers just a two-year warranty that pales in comparison to other brands’ more comprehensive (and sometimes lifetime!) warranties. These wheels seemed to take a beating without issue in my time with them, but a lifetime warranty is almost a requirement at this price.
Conclusion
How much does a wavy rim cost, you ask? Based on the competition–the Zipp 353 NSW and Princeton Carbonworks’ options–it’s quite a bit of money. The Fulcrum Sharq wheels cost less money, but there’s no getting around the cost of these. But as I said earlier, I think the Sharq wheels feel worth the money.
The Fulcrum Sharq wheels feel like new territory for Fulcrum, a company that sometimes feels a quarter-step behind the competition in its feature set. These wheels feel genuinely modern. And rather than not quite succeeding at being a jack of all trades, I think these wheels do a convincing job of being a high-performance wheel for the average (read, non-racing) road or gravel cyclist alike.
Great build quality, distinctive looks, and the numbers to back it up. Nice job, Fulcrum. Just make sure you don’t crash these wheels, folks!
