Quote:
Originally Posted by robertbb
I really appreciate this response Josh! 
It's great to get insight from someone who legitimately knows what they are talking about and is willing to take the time to help the average punter who most certainly is not Cancellara, Wiggins or Sagan 
Curious as to your thoughts on that margin of error though. With such small changes to pressure required in moving from 23-25 or even 25-28, one wonders if the average floor pump/pressure gauge is up to the task!
I choose butyl tubes simply because the pressure I start a ride with is likely to be the pressure I finish it with. While I enjoyed running latex tubes for a while, if I went out on a century and had a stop for lunch/coffee, I'd find my pressure had dropped so much that any RR gains of the latex tube were probably negated and even inversed towards the end... |
robertbb, thanks for the comment and thanks for giving me a great opportunity to plug some SILCA pumps with super accurate gauges!! In all seriousness though it was the last 10+ years of doing this that inspired us to make super accurate gauge pumps, and if you read our
Road to Roubaix Blog story you'll see that we considered this secret so secret that I travelled around Europe with a $1000 gauge for a few years in a pelican handgun case and we only used it out of site of other teams and the media.. Now we make a handful of pumps with specially tuned digital sensors to achieve 0.5psi accuracy at these types of pressures which are used by more teams than those we 'officially' work with.
As for latex, look at the modern latex, we sell tubes made by Vittoria which have a new formula with graphene in them and leak so much slower than the old ones. When we plotted Cancellara's roubaix run in 2010, we measured his tires to have nearly 1psi per hour loss.. so we tuned pressures so they would be perfect a few hours into the race when he was on the worst cobbles.. The new generation of latex tubes might lose 4-5psi per 24 hours, and will save you 2-5 watts per tire which is a bigger savings than a full ceramic bearing upgrade for about 1/50th the price!!