Nerd Alert Podcast: Clinchers and inner tubes at Paris-Roubaix?
James and Dave chatted with key members of the Deceuninck-QuickStep team as well as Jeff Meyer, engineering manager at Roval, to discuss the team's transition to clinchers and inner tubes.
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Team Deceuninck-QuickStep and Bora-Hansgrohe — together with sponsors Roval and Specialized — have been doing a fair bit of experimenting with their wheels and tires over the past couple of years, gradually moving away from traditional tubulars to tube-type clinchers for time trials and tubeless clinchers for road races. In an unusual move, both teams say they’re now wholly committed to clinchers and latex inner tubes for everything — even possibly (but not likely) Paris-Roubaix.
To find out more about the surprising decision, James and Dave have a chat with Roval engineering manager Jeff Meyer, as well as three key players from the Deceuninck-QuickStep team: technical director Ricardo Scheidecker, team scientist and coach Koen Pelgrim, and head mechanic Nicolas Coosemans.
This conversation is a follow-on from a feature written last year that covered why Specialized had stopped investing in tubulars.