Clinchers that Matter
Transform your road bike with a new set of wheels
Transform your road bike with a new set of wheels
Is your bike lacking a bit of snap? Well, a new set of wheels can take care of that. Few upgrades have the same impact on your ride as a new pair of hoops. You can go for deeper rims if beating the wind is a priority. Or, shed some grams so you can climb a little easier. High quality hubs will mean you’ll roll better with each pedal stroke. While tubular wheels are great for the pros, the performance and easy maintainability of clinchers are perfect for those of us who ride without a support vehicle. Set any of the seven sets below into your bike’s dropouts and enjoy the ride.
Vision Metron 55 SL clinchers are very well behaved, strikingly so. I know some other wheels with similar mid-range depths, 48 to 60 mm deep, that can act up in the wind, especially at certain yaw angles (those vectors that take into account the air you’re pushing as you go forward and the wind that’s blowing against you). Yes, some of those misbehaving wheels push back when they don’t like the forces acting on them. Some wheels, even when they’re about to cut through the wind properly, give a momentary tug as the air catches around them. But those Metron 55 SL wheels don’t do any of that. “The rim profile has more of an oval shape now than the traditional V shape,” says Michael Lawless, North American marketing manager for Vision and fsa. “This shape allows each wheel to deflect crosswinds toward the centre of the wheel (the most stable point), making things less twitchy on windy days. Vision wheels are designed to perform the best in crosswinds (higher angles of yaw) because very rarely does a rider have a 100 per cent headwind.” The hubs on the wheels are quite elegant and well-designed. They use the company’s Preloaded Reduction Assembly (pra) system, which makes adjusting the preload quite user friendly. You simply loosen the pinch bolt on the hub collar, tighten the collar by hand and then back it off by about a one-eighth turn. Each hub uses angularcontact bearings, sealed-cartridge bearings that can address the radial and axial forces that act on them. A regular cartridge bearing is only designed to handle forces along one plane. With hubs, which tilt this way and that in the corners, it’s best to have bearing races that account for the various forces. The Vision Metron 55 SL is an excellent alternative to the more expensive Zipp 404. The Zipps are slightly lighter, 1,690 g, while the Merton 55s are 1,730 g. The Zipps also have a slightly better brake track. But the performance you get out of the Visions at $1,700 for the pair, instead of roughly $3,000 for the Zipps, is excellent. ($ 1,700, visiontechusa.com) — mp