bakerjw

I know that there are some tubeless tire and rim combinations that don't require sealant. I wonder if he was running sealant or not. My road tires are Hutchinsons and I run sealant in them. Small holes seal up remarkably well.

noodle soup

I've never heard "immune to punctures" either.

The tires will still get punctures, but the sealant usually keeps the tire from going flat. That's my understanding of it anyway.

gregf83 

In retrospect the wrong decision but hard to classify it as 'unbelievably dumb' when he did well with the same setup the week before (which also include cobbles but not as many) and in recon rides on P-R. In summary, those wheels and tires worked fine in practice on the sames roads.

WhyFi

Feel free to interpret it how you'd like, but it's not changing my mind. Getting away with something stupid, 'specially with a small sample size, doesn't make it not stupid, IMO. Does blasting through three red lights without getting t-boned make it not stupid to blast through the fourth?

gregf83 

I love armchair experts. You should publish the equipment setup guaranteed to produce a win with no punctures...

Marcus_Ti

Not only that...those tires have a reputation in reviews for being as fragile as tissue paper. Talk about asking for it.

What is more, everyone was having flats on tubs as well.

WhyFi

Awesome rebuttal and ironclad logic in extrapolating my comment. Kudos.

jadocs

LOL......WhyFi does have a point regarding the setup

79pmooney

The 5-star cobbles on P-R are an order of magnitude worse than any other cobbles in any other race. No one pre-rides those sectors at race speed. No one. And certainly not following a wheel where you cannot see the road and cobbles ahead or in the thick dust of 100 riders and vehicles all going 25 mph. No coach or manager is ever going to allow his star to take that crash risk just for "re-con". (Plus it is so painful just to ride those cobbles, very few would do it voluntarily.)

The pre-rides and previous races meant nothing. The experience gathered over racing those roads the past century - everything. (And yes, all tires, even the best, can "puncture" at P-R. Having a tire you can ride flat until a good place to pull off for a wheel change could be a minutes saving blessing. Yet another reason not to ride clincher or tubeless.)

On punctures - I think of punctures as being from glass or debris, even sharp rocks, cutting through the casing (and inner tube if one). I suspect that is the minority of flats at P-R; that blowouts and pinch flats (and now "burps") are more common from hard hits on rocks and pothole lips that may or may not be sharp.

Ben

JohnJ80

Agree. Almost to the level of mechanic malpractice. It's kind of an unbelievable choice of tire and size.

Isn't it Vittoria that's in a spat with Enve right now too?

J.

RedBullFiXX

Well in all fairness, Kristoff did say he took a BIG risk in his choice of equipment
Risk vs reward in this case, odd choice

JohnJ80

63rickert

Pros generally get good bikes with good parts. There is no guarantee that mere fact of being pro means your bike has best of best at all times. Agree with WhyFi. And not the least surprised that Kristoff got his bad decision past his mechanic and past his directeur sportif. There is a lot of chaos in racing. Chaos on the road and chaos where the mechanics work. The mechanics are not always the greatest. I've had ex-pro team mechanics work on my bike who are not allowed near the bike again. Not just one of them. Main job of a mechanic is to stay awake, accept crazy hours, low pay. When an exceptional mechanic appears - as Ernesto Colnago or George Noyes - everyone knows it.

Pros are once again mostly on tubulars. Lots of pro racing has been done on regular clinchers with tubes. Through the 90s and the aughts it was usually only team captain who got the tubulars. And sometimes the captain declined and used what everyone else was using. Clinchers from twenty years ago were not as good as what we can all have now if we want. Tubulars of twenty years ago flatted a whole lot more than current tubulars. Tires available now are very significantly better than they have ever been.

If you spend some time in the sport sooner or later you will have an opportunity to acquire ex-team bikes. Some of them are great bikes and great bargains. Some of them are a mess. They were raced while being a mess.

colnago62

The pros are using tubulars which don’t pinch flat.

Dean V

As has been pointed out, tubulars can pinch flat, just not as easily as clinchers.

Zaskar

Yes... they do.

noodle soup

I would like to see a list of all the tires used in the Paris-Roubaix

Zaskar

Me too! In general, I'm surprised how little the commentators talk about equipment. I mean, if I had to call a 4-hour race... at some point, I'd run out of **** to talk about and start in on the bikes. Especially on Paris Roubaix!

Trsnrtr

Closest that I could find was Cycling News and their tech report for most races. Peering through the 101 images shows mostly tubulars, many 30 mm.

Paris-Roubaix tech gallery: 101 images from the Hell of the North | Cyclingnews.com

noodle soup

It wouldn't surprise me if most Schwalbe sponsored teams were using the 30mm G-One Speed tubular.

63rickert

Fifty years ago Paris- Roubaix was mostly raced on tubulars 26 to 30mm wide. In 2019 Paris-Roubaix was mostly raced on tubulars 26 to 30mm wide. Might just be that tubulars 26 to 30mm wide are optimum for Paris-Roubaix.

aclinjury

read the article carefully

Kristoff didn't use the Corsa Speed. He used the normal Corsa TLR in 25c (290g). His wheels, the Bora WTB, have a 19mm wide internal width, and are designed with 25c or 28c tires. Now you could in hindsight argue he should have used the 28c tire, which weighs 310g. But given that
1) they've had great sucess with the 25c, so they stuck with it
2) since Kristoff had 3 flats, which is a lot, there would still stand a good chance that the issue might have happened with the 28c too

Think of it this way, if the mechs went with the 28c and got flatten (say twice), then they stand a great chance of getting shafted by the DS why they didn't stick with the 25c (which up then was proven).

Dave Mayer

Truth. There is no way a PR rider is going to be on clinchers, tubeless or otherwise. It is not just the safety liability when you do have a flat, but the susceptibility to pinch flats, the almost 100% certainty of damaging the rim hooks, and the insurmountable weight handicap.

Tubulars are superior in every respect to tubeless even when applied to a regular race stage. But for a rider to be on clinchers/tubeless at PR is stupidity of the highest order. I assume the support team were all fired for such a blatant lapse of judgment.

ThermionicScott 

It would need to be taken with a grain of salt, given the rebranding by team sponsors:



(Gee, which Maxxis model is this? )

noodle soup

No matter how many times you mention this, it's just not true. I've seen hundreds of flat spotted wheels that needed rim replacements, and only a handful of them had any damage to the hooks(and most of those were on mountain bikes). Maybe this was a common problem when you last used clinchers, but it's very rare these days. Yes it does happen occasionally, but it's nowhere near as common as you claim.