WHAT IS THE FASTEST HANDLEBARS FOR ROAD CYCLING? | RDMN CLIPS

1.Why Round Handlebars Cost You Watts

So I think we've been so focused in the old days on Pros being low long and low but you know in a lot of cases it you don't necessarily need the low if you can hit the long and the narrow um and so some of the the road bike wind tunnel testing I mean we've done I I've seen we can make some changes up there and pretty quickly find 30 watts of savings at 45k an hour Coach our next handlebars they're purported to be 21 Watts faster than a round bar and I think that testing's not like 45 kilometers an hour that's their own data so again I'm not sure what we read into the is it just an arrow like an arrow flat like the flat top of the bar is Arrow shaped or no it's actually almost mimicking the position that you would turn your holds in so it's quite a you know a focused design yeah yeah no I'll take a look at yeah I mean it because it's amazing the the just making the handlebar of an arrow cross section can be 20 to 30 Watts um which is nuts I remember first discovering that 20 years ago when we're playing with the the very first carbon handlebars and you're like oh wow I you know you come out of school and you know that round is bad right cylinders are just terrible aerodynamically um but then you actually make the top of a handlebar into a wing and I mean you don't even have doesn't have to be that good of a wing you don't have to be all that smart you didn't even have to try that hard and it's 20 watts um on the bike so you know that that is you know one of the things we tell our athletes I mean you should never ever ever be riding around handlebar I mean it just um it is the worst of all the possibilities right it's it's more pressure on your hands it's less uh vertical deflection for Comfort um and it's significantly less arrow and and so you know we still get these guys oh yeah but this is a special you know it's made for me in Germany and it's 150 grams like I don't care back to like weight will matter for two percent of uh you know whatever event you're in and if you're a world tour pro we're already adding weight to your bike so stop getting hung up on taking 10 grams out of this part that just makes some poor mechanic have to put 10 more grams back in somewhere um and yeah you can find huge differences with with arrow shapes up front and then also I mean just getting narrow and and funny enough and we knew this in the 70s right I mean I you know the guys I grew up uh kind of being mentored by you know they were all racing like 35 and 38 centimeter bars it was really only I think in the 90s the bars started to get wide um again so it was kind of like we we had this this secret and then we kind of lost it and now we're finding it again if you enjoyed this little clip from the podcast you can check out full episodes of the podcast on any podcast platform Apple Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts also you can click up here for another video that I know you're going to love and don't forget to subscribe to the channel see you next day