ZRACE M1 X4 Review: Four-Piston Brakes for Under $85

Most of the parts I test here are trying to make a bike lighter, faster or better looking. Brakes sit in a different category. They are the one system where saving money and getting it wrong at the same time has real consequences, so I was slower to trust these than anything else on the build.

The ZRACE M1 X4 is a complete four-piston set, front and rear, and it currently sits at around $81. That is less than a single lever from most of the brands its design nods to. Mine have been on my AliExpress gravel bike since the beginning, through the parts overview above and the ride report that followed, and they are the component from that build I have thought about changing the least.

The specs

That weight is the quoted figure rather than one off my own scale, so treat it as a guide. Everything else I have confirmed on the parts in my hands.

The price is the part worth sitting with. A four-piston brakeset from Shimano or SRAM starts at roughly double this, and the boutique end of the market is somewhere else entirely. It is worth checking what the set is going for today, because ZRACE pricing moves around a lot and I have seen this listing swing by $20 in a month.

Where they genuinely impressed me: the lever

The lever is the reason I kept these on the bike.

Reach adjustment on cheap brakes is usually an afterthought, a grub screw with about four millimetres of usable range that you set once and never touch. The M1 X4 gives you enough travel to actually dial the blade to your hand, and the adjustment holds where you put it. I have small hands and I run levers closer to the bar than most people do, and this is the first budget brake I have fitted that got there without a compromise.

The other half of that story is pressure. I bled these once, fairly early on, and I have not touched them since. No wandering bite point, no lever slowly creeping closer to the bar over a season, no spongy first pull after the bike has been hanging up for three weeks. For a mineral oil system at this price that is the single most important thing it could do, and it has done it without any attention from me.

One thing to know before you buy: there is no bite point adjuster. If you are the kind of rider who wants to set contact point independently of reach, this is the wrong brake. ZRACE also revises these quietly, so check the current listing photos before you order if that matters to you.

The honest compromise: you have seen this design before

Here is my one real criticism, and it is not about how the brake works.

The lever borrows very heavily from Trickstuff, the German outfit that has been machining brakes in Freiburg since 2003. Their Direttissima costs around €375 to €450 for a single brake, so a pair sits near ten times what the whole ZRACE set costs. The flat, single-finger blade and the shape of the master cylinder housing are close enough that anyone who follows the high end will spot it immediately. The caliper is a different story: that one looks far more like a Hope, which is British rather than German.

Whether that bothers you is a personal question. It bothers me a little. Trickstuff is a small company doing genuinely original engineering, and there is something uncomfortable about a €80 set trading on the silhouette they spent years developing. It has not stopped me riding these, and I am not going to pretend otherwise, but I would rather ZRACE had drawn their own lever.

If you do not follow brake design closely, none of this will register and you will simply think the bike looks good.

The machining marks

Look closely and you will find tool marks, mostly around the caliper and a little inside it. On a Hope or a Trickstuff you would not see them, and at four times the price you would be right to complain.

At this price I have come round to them. They are evidence of how the part was made, and on a bike built entirely from AliExpress components there is something honest about a caliper that shows its own machining. The anodising is clean, the edges are properly broken, and the overall finish is a long way above what I expected. This set genuinely looks better on the bike than the price suggests, which is not a sentence I write often.

Who this is for

Buy them if you want four-piston power on a budget build, you run mineral oil already, and you care about how the cockpit looks. They are an easy recommendation for a gravel bike, a hardtail, or any build where the brakes are usually the compromise.

Skip them if you need a bite point adjuster, or if buying a part that leans this hard on somebody else's design would nag at you every time you looked down.

Verdict

These are the part of my AliExpress gravel build I would buy again without hesitating. They stop the bike properly, the lever adjusts to my hand, and after one bleed they have been completely maintenance free. The looks are the bonus, and they are also the thing I feel slightly conflicted about.

At around $81 for a full four-piston set, the value is difficult to argue with. Check the current price on AliExpress, and if the listing is at the bottom of its usual range, I would recommend to pick them up.