Peak summer, memories of rain jackets and numb toes barely even a blip in the collective memory of the northern hemisphere’s cycling community. Heatwaves, ultra grippy tyres and tarmac, tan lines, and the Vuelta a España.
We’ve been making hay while the sun shines this month, if by ‘hay’ you mean ‘premium quality cycling content’. We’ve brought you a review of the new Garmin Edge 1040 Solar, perfect for long sunny days and riders who forget to charge everything. Also, given the shortages in the supply of nearly everything nowadays we brought you a list of bikes with Shimano 105 Di2 that you can actually get your hands on.
We’ve got a load of tyres queued up for the coming months, and as a primer, we’ve put together a guide to TPI (threads per inch) and why it’s important, as well as a list of the best tyre levers so you can actually get the things on and off your rims without resorting to coarse language.
But that’s not all. In fact, while we thought July was a busy month thanks to the Tour de France, August has been just as packed.
For example, Zipp launched a new pair of deep aero wheelsets. The 808 Firecrest and the 858 NSW. The latter could really shift the needle of what’s expected from a deep wheel, with its impressive weight of 1530g. Cadex did a similar thing with its new 50mm deep 50 Ultra Disc wheelsystem, which we weighed at just 1316g. Elsewhere, Cannondale also put one of its products on a diet, this time the SuperSix Evo, with the launch of its 90g lighter Leightbau edition.
The other big breakthrough this month was from British time triallist (and performance engineer at INEOS Grenadiers) Dan Bigham, who toppled Victor Campanaerts from his World Hour Record throne with a distance of 55.548km. He did so on a prototype Pinarello with some wild aero considerations.
Talking of aero considerations, our tech editor Josh went to the wind tunnel with a car full of wheelsets and put them through their paces. The resulting road bike wheels aero test was hugely popular among our readers, even if the results did lead to just as many questions.
One of those questions was whether you need to spend big money to get the best wheels, and that’s a theme we’ve continued throughout other areas of cycling. For example, we pondered what the differences were between cheap and expensive bike computers, as well as wondering whether there’s a safety concern when comparing cheap vs expensive bike helmets
Elsewhere, Josh also had a chat…
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