On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 9:18:05 AM UTC-5, jbeattie wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 3:51:56 AM UTC-7, wrote:
On Tuesday, July 9, 2019 at 12:00:31 AM UTC+2, Tom Kunich wrote:
The comments that are going along with the Tour do not seem to be very strongly connected to reality. The first stage sprint hardly shows anything that the end results of Tour are going to be. Sagan did not look good. He looked worse today. But his strong point is that he is capable of staying up with the pack in the hills and most sprinters aren't. And he is capable of blasting a sprint after he gets into the Tour while others appear to slow down.

The Team Time Trial had only something like a minute and a half or two between all of the teams and that gives you a pretty good idea of how close we can expect the competition.

Tiny differences such as the rolling resistance of the tubeless tires vs tubulars do make a difference at this level. What's more, now that the racing is so close, the problem with a tubular having a flat is problematic.. So the value of a tubeless tire would be the absence of flat tires.

With the disk brakes and consequential 10 mm axles you can hardly expect to change wheels for a flat anymore so they are now changing bikes. The neutral support car is providing bikes that may be totally unfamiliar whereas in the past there was very little difference bike to bike.

To repeat an engineering problem with disk brakes, the forces applied on the frameset by disks are in the worst possible place. At the end of the fork and at the end of the thinnest end of the stay. It also adds weight further out on the extremities though I doubt that makes any difference Also there is no way to really make these disks aero and slicing slots in them to lighten them up causes aero turbulence themselves. And they are especially dangerous in crashes especially after hard braking since they have lower radius and lower contact area making them red hot and sharp edged.

Last year or the year before when I contacted one of the mechanics he said that the reason that they were using tubulars instead of clinchers or tubeless was because they could change tires on the go inside the team car.. Well, the consequences of a flat now are too large so tubeless tires apparently are becoming more attractive.

Another problem is apparently showing up. The electronic shifting is on virtually every bike in the Peloton. But these things are not in the least reliable. On a ride with a guy that always has the latest and greatest, he had Di2 and said that the battery was supposed to last a week. Yet his shifting failed in less than an hour. You can manually move the rear derailleur into an appropriate gear so you can get home - but there goes the ride. Not to mention a race.

My friend says that those people standing by the side of the road reportedly for flats are instead there because of the failure of the electronic shifting. I thought it a bit unusual since they weren't looking at a tire as most do when they have a flat. So I guess he was right.

One thing to remember is that they still have a UCI weight limit though all of the components are getting lighter. This gives the builder the ability to make heavier framesets. It appears that Specialized and Cannondale have gone this route and Trek has not. Trek is presently making the lightest frameset on the market that is mass produced. Oddly enough they offer these spectacularly light framesets under a variety of groupsets so that you CAN get one of these quite cheaply. Trek's email to me showed a $3,000 version I think with Tiagra on it. That is a Chinese level of Shimano. I didn't have any particular problems with that groupset when I tried it but since it is on the cheap end of the Shimano production I would worry about the reliability of it. And buying higher end stuff later is considerably more expensive.

The advantage of Trek is the lifetime warranty. So you don't have to worry about it if you buy it in your 20's and keep it for the rest of your life. But most people "move up" and seldom keep a bike very long unless you're like the non-riders commenting on .tech who have bicycles from the middle of the last century.

Having looked into Graphene rather than mentioned its name this stuff is not going to radicalize carbon fiber bikes though it could make it less prone to failure via tearing. The material itself is very difficult to manufacture in sheets of any significant size so most things labeled with "graphene" have particle-like small flakes like your skin peeling after a sunburn.