Nerd Alert Podcast: Tubulars aren’t dead yet
James chats with Morgan Nicol from Challenge about their latest tubulars.
Heading out the door? Read this article on the new Outside+ app available now on iOS devices for members! Download the app.
We’ve chatted an awful lot lately about how tubeless and tube-type clinchers seem to be slowly replacing tubulars in pro road racing. Even though high-performance clinchers offer a big rolling efficiency advantage (as much as 12 W according to some figures), tubulars are still more popular for all the same reasons as usual: they’re lighter, they’re safer if you get a puncture, they handle impacts better, and they just have a distinctive feel that clinchers still can’t quite match.
What if you could have a tubular that offered all of that, and yet was also just as fast as top-end clinchers? What might the landscape look like then? That’s just what Challenge claims to have developed with its latest experimental tubulars, and James gets the scoop from the company’s technical director, Morgan Nicol.
SUBSCRIBE TO THE ‘NERD ALERT’ PODCAST
Never miss an episode. Subscribe to our ‘Nerd Alert’ podcast on iTunes, Spotify, Google or wherever you get your podcasts.