It’s Campagnolo’s Hour Record Too

May 1, 2015 – New Pista Wheels and Chainring to take on THE HOUR RECORD Since the beginning of competitive cycling the debate over the fastest athlete in our great sport has caused much controversy during any conversation regarding the subject.

Campagnolo PR

While road racing would be a seemingly obvious area to determine the title of “strongest cyclist”, there are so many variables that it is never easy to compare one athlete to another. Both climbers and sprinters are extremely talented athletes and each excel on specific types of courses whereas on others they are less efficient.

However, for over a century there is one grueling test that, upon its successful completion, leaves no doubt as to whom the title of world’s fastest cyclist belongs. The Hour Record has been the most extreme and pure test of a cyclist’s ability to perform for over 100 years and a great deal of this history making has seen Campagnolo at the middle of the action.

With the renewed attention building around the event, thanks to some slight rule changes by the UCI, Campagnolo aims to once again find itself at the center of perhaps the most grueling and objective test of cycling strength in our great sport. Campagnolo aims to continuously innovate and create solutions that will improve the cycling experience and give those athletes who choose to use Campagnolo an added technological advantage towards achieving their goals.

In the case of the hour record on the track, Campagnolo is very enthusiastic and driven to produce a performance oriented product capable of propelling an athlete farther in 60 minutes than ever before. The announcement by Dowsett of Team Movistar to try his hand at riding into the history books was taken very seriously by the Italian company and engineers were immediately sent to work upon a completely new project.

Making componentry with the intention of setting a new world record while still maintaining the reliability and longevity that must be included in each and every Campagnolo product was to prove quite the ambitious undertaking. While a track bike seems less complex than its road racing or TT counterpart, the lack of componentry to www.campagnolo.com www.campagnolo.com modify actually accentuates the importance of the few components that can be altered.

The Campy Tech Lab set out to improve the critical areas to be altered in order to give any athlete a fighting chance against the most feared adversary on the track: the clock. Campagnolo engineers set out to innovate upon the disc wheel for the track and improve upon the technologies that have aided champions in their various battles upon the wooden boards of the velodrome. With the Ghibli Pista (the very first tenso-structure wheel introduced in the cycling world) in hand, the R+D department sought to take lessons from this iconic and extremely successful wheel in order to bring forth the next generation of performance.

Since its inception new materials have been introduced and sophisticated production methods developed allowing for an increasingly more complex and more performance oriented Pista disc wheel. Incorporation of carbon fiber throughout in addition to completely new construction techniques give the new wheelset an ultralight build while not sacrificing its performance attributes.

The Campagnolo engineers were able to produce an extremely fast wheel that comes in a featherweight package. With a front wheel tipping the scales at a scant 800grams and the rear at an incredibly low 825 grams the new disc wheels are effectively the lightest performance solution available.

Minimizing material but maximizing efficiency in its employment allowed the Campy Tech Lab to not only make this new wheel lighter but, more importantly for its specific intended purpose of battling the clock, to improve its reactivity and rigidity. The new structure and design allows for solid and stable stance that transfers power towards forward motion as opposed to allowing lateral flex or torsion.

The new structure, despite its lightweight construction, is also the stiffest amongst the leading disc wheel competitors according to laboratory tests. www.campagnolo.com www.campagnolo.com Campagnolo recognized that in an attempt to set a new hour record obstacles come not only in the form of energy lost to wheel flex, aerodynamic drag or in-efficient power transfer but also in the form of friction.

With this in mind even the hub of this new wheelset was developed in a way to house Campagnolo’s ultra smooth and efficient CULT Ceramic Bearing Technology. CULT ceramic bearings coupled with a proprietary housing needing only a thin dose of oil for lubrication will reduce the friction that Dowsett or any other athlete who attempts to take on the our record must overcome in such a way that one must experience to grasp.

To ensure that the transmission of Dowsett’s hour record bike is as efficient as the wheelset he will use, Campagnolo engineers set out to develop a new chainring as well. Following a design standard that would be compatible with the newest generation of performance cranksets developed for the professional athletes on the road, a new “Pista” chainring was studied and designed in a way to maximize the chain line for pista while being compatible with the current bolt pattern and spacing.

This new design allows for the use of the increased performance standards of the 4 arm spider in addition to the incorporation of the power meter designed along these same standards. Due to the increased diameter of such a long gear, the material employment along the internal side of the chainring was studied meticulously in order to ensure an even higher degree of stiffness and maximum power transfer.

As Alex Dowsett takes to the track in his effort to pedal into the history books, he can be confident that Campagnolo will be a dependable and fundamental ally during his 60 minutes of extreme effort. With a stiffer, more efficient, smoother rolling and lighter weight wheelset than anything ever produced before along with an extremely precise, stiff and specifically designed chainring Dowsett can be confident that no rider before him was better prepared on a technical level or could take advantage of such sophisticated equipment to achieve success in this most arduous and ambitious undertaking of beating the hour record.