Maybe we're being over-sensitive, but we sure wish Zero Gravity picked a different name for these brakes. "NERD" reminds us all-too-well of what we felt like back in the late 80's when we were in high school and we first discovered bike racing. It was years of self-conscious misery back then. Our pals who played football and soccer got the dual benefits of general societal approval plus backseat, Friday night license to paw on the cheerleaders, whilst we few bike racers were banished to fantasyland -- the fantasy of being fast like LeMond or Knickman, the fantasy of wishing that 17 year old girls deemed choppily shaven legs equally as appealing as linebacker biceps. NERD is what we were, and it was a dark time. We sure wish Zero Gravity wasn't reminding us of it.

In fact, NERD is not meant to reference a bike racer's place in respectable society. Rather, it's an unfortunate acronym that stands for "New England Red Devil" -- apparently the nickname of the bike mechanic who first requested that Zero Gravity produce these brakes. In a nutshell, what you're getting here is a set of Zero Gravity Negative G brakes with full-on titanium hardware. They feature the distinctive added stiffness & stopping power of the Negative G (when compared to the super-light 0G-Ti calipers), but you're getting them in anodized Red instead of in standard Zero Gravity Black. Like adding colored Hudz brake hoods or a white saddle to your bike, you'll be stunned at how a small change like adding these brakes will give a facelift to the overall appearance of your bike. One other small cool detail is the variation of the Zero Gravity logo on these calipers -- it gets subtle devil horns. ZG did a darn good job graphics-wise with this.

The weight of these brakes will be just like the standard Negative G -- it'll fall between 190g-196g. And they come standard with black, all-purpose Swiss Stop brake pads. We're getting in less than 50 sets of these, and Zero Gravity assures us that they're producing a very limited run of them, with no additional runs. So if you want them, get them while they're here because they won't be for long.