You’ve got to love this. The guy in the Carrera must have been like, “damn, I’m getting passed by a VW Microbus…”

After a nice 100k ride, I sat down with Richard Dunn, Race Director for the Tour of America. We get the low down on the planning and the $1,000,000 first prize.

Richard rides a bike not often seen - the very rare Pegoretti (from Italy of course).

These replace my trusty Campagnolo Protons, which had about 40k miles on them. The Campys were still straight and smooth, but I wanted a PowerTap system.  I also wanted to achieve the balance of a wheelset that was durable enough for everyday use, with easily replaceable rims and spokes, but light enough so that I could do some non-key races on them to collect data.  Both sets of my race wheels are non-PowerTap. 

My recommendations for rims, spokes, and lacing pattern came from Troy Watson at  Ligero Wheelworks in Tenennessee. These are the first set of non-prebuilt wheels I have owned that I did not build myself. I decided to have Troy build them after speaking with him at length about his wheel building methods, philosophy, and because Troy has built lots of wheels for many top level domestic pros and amateurs with great results.

Here’s what we came up with:
Rims
Velocity Aerohead 24 hole front, Velocity Aerohead OC (off center) 28 hole rear
Spokes
Sapim CX-Ray
Nipples
DT Prolock aluminium
Lacing
Radial front with spokeheads in, 1x / 2x rear with spoke heads in on the drive side to effectively increase hub shell width
Hubs
Rear hub - PowerTap SL 2.4 wireless, no wires and light. Got a killer deal too through the team sponsorship. Front hub - Matching front, nothing really special, but it is light and smooth. Plus you know I’ve got to be all matchy, matchy.

With the increased volume of emails we will read 6 on the podcast then post the remainder here.  There are 9 of them below.  Read, enjoy, comment…  Read the rest of this entry »

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Finally, a new podcast. We change things up a bit with the order and listener feedback. International News: Joe V. asks about what we think of Rock Racing. We tell him. Tour of Malaysia news, VDB is back… again. Technology: The DeFeet Slipstream over sock explained. Sean Kelly? Broken chain search in Florida. Local Scene: Florida racing and training. Listener Feedback: We read 6 of 18 emails. The rest will be posted here. Glenn Quagmire makes a list, A Rice Crispy calls us boring and annoying and jerky and a few other things, the Welsh Superfan has a Magnus Backstedt sighting, John makes up with Trek Todd, Columbus John agrees with top tube cable routing, Greg does not.