This past week, I left the dreary UK skies and headed to the Tuscan coast to attend the annual Road Bike Connection (RBC) in Massa Marittima. The event hosts multiple cycling brands and journalists to let tech writers get hands-on with new products and face-to-face time with the engineers and designers behind them.
At this edition, multiple brands from across the industry attended, from Campagnolo and Pirelli to Core and Assos. With plenty to unpack and some products yet to be officially announced, you will likely see products from this event trickle onto the Escape Collective homepage over the coming weeks and months.
Road Bike Connection and its off-road counterpart are the brainchild of friends Simon Cittati and Giulio Neri. A key inspiration for Bike Connection was a format previously used in the United States called Bike Press Camp.
The insight is simple. The time commitment and cost of on-site product launches can be difficult for smaller brands in particular. Environmental concerns are also a reason to bring brands together for shared launch events. And for media, having multiple brands in one place for direct interviews and on-bike time on new products condenses multiple press trips into one.
Vision releases a new carbon-spoked RS wheel range
Vision showed off its new flagship road wheelsets, the Metron 45 and 60 RS, named for their respective rim depths. The headline feature of these new wheels is that they are built using carbon fibre spokes. This technology is nothing new to the cycling world, but it does mark Vision's first foray into carbon-spoked wheels, which were used at Milan-San Remo by EF Education-EasyPost and Arkéa-B&B Hotels riders.
Along with the carbon fibre spokes, the wheels have received an overhauled hub design with the new V-1000 hubs. The new hubs keep the brand's PRS ratchet freehub design with 72 teeth for a 5º angle of engagement, but the flagship hubs now get ceramic bearings and more machining for a bit of weight saving in the V-800 hubs on the Metron SL range. An important but outwardly invisible difference is that the V-1000 series offers tool-free maintenance.
As discussion of Tubeless Straight Side (a.k.a. hookless) rim and tyre technology in road bikes continues, Vision expressed that it is committed to retaining a hooked rim profile in its road wheel range. The new rims sport a 23 mm internal rim width, up from 21 mm on the SL models. Vision says that added width helps to improve the aero performance of the wheel/tyre system as a whole when using tyres wider than 28 mm, as is increasingly common on the road today. Vision says its wind tunnel testing at the San Diego Low-Speed Wind Tunnel found that the new 45 RS was 9% faster when averaged over a yaw sweep of -20º - +20º at 48.2 km/h (30 mph), compared to the Metron 45 SL. Similarly, the 60 RS improved by 6% across the sweep compared to the 60 SL at the tested speed.
These updates have saved 100 grams for each wheelset; the 45 RS tips the scales at 1,290 grams and the 60 RS at 1,390 grams (both claimed weights). The 45 RS will sell for US$3,300 / £3,110 / €3,110 whilst the 60 RS retails for US$3,400 / £3,180 / €3,180.
Vision had several wheelsets to demo on the surrounding Tuscan roads around Massa Marittima. It is always difficult to dive into a wheelset's specific performance at a press camp; the number of variables makes it hard to pinpoint any attributes of the wheels themselves. At RBC, I was riding a bike I had never ridden, on roads that were new to me, and with tyres that I was unfamiliar with, so a true critical assessment of the wheelset in this setting was impossible.
Even with this in mind, the stiffness in the 45 RS wheels I rode was noticeable on the winding, rolling roads. Especially at lower speeds when kicking out of a tight uphill switchback, the wheels felt responsive with a stiffer feel compared to steel-spoked wheels. Rocking the bike from side to side, accelerating out of the saddle from low speed, when high torsional loads are transferred through the bike, the bike pushes forward with a snappiness that I haven't found with steel-spoked wheels. How much of that is the wheel versus the bike, or even tyres? Only future testing will tell.
I also didn't have enough time to get a firm sense of handling, but one experience offers a brief clue: Across one open expanse of grassland, the wind picked up with a ferocious gust. Given I was on an unfamiliar bike, with the brake lever-caliper connection set up reverse to my preference, there was a little bit of apprehension as I cleared that last bit of tree cover. I was pleasantly surprised that even in the initial few meters when some snatching would have been expected, the bike seemed unbuffeted by the strong side wind.
A clearer takeaway is just how loud the PRS V-1000 ratchet hub is: it sounds like you are trying to raid a hive of bees for their honey. The 5º engagement is rapid enough for road riding, however, if you enjoy riding for peace and tranquillity, this wheelset is not for you.
Beyond these initial impressions, I can't say more about ride quality and certainly about durability and serviceability without getting significant time on them in a more familiar setting.
Core drops its second-generation body temperature sensor
Swiss brand Core showed off its freshly launched second-generation body temperature sensor. The brand has been around for over a decade and works directly with seven men's and women's WorldTeams. Tracking core body temperature has several performance applications. In the short term, it helps monitor a rider's acclimation to hotter conditions – say, if you're preparing for an event in southern Europe in late summer.
But emerging scientific research suggests that longer-term use of heat training may have more direct effects on performance. Heat training is sometimes coined as the "poor man’s altitude training," because it creates broadly similar changes in blood chemistry but can be done at home. Over a period of even a month, heat training has been found to increase haemoglobin mass and blood plasma volume. That said, research has found inconsistent performance outcomes, so more investigation is necessary.
The unit measures skin temperature, which is then fed into an algorithm developed by the brand to calculate core body temperature with a claimed accuracy of -0.01°C to +0.23°C (meaning it's slightly more prone to read high than low).
The inner workings of the second-generation sensor remain largely unchanged from the first model; most of the changes centre on its size and user interface.
Feedback from users highlighted that the first-generation sensor was vulnerable to damage, specifically the plastic retaining arms that clipped to a heart rate strap. The new model uses an external housing with a completely closed mounting design that threads through a strap. Crucially, the housing can be replaced separately from the sensor if it becomes damaged. That redesign also reduced the sensor size by 48% and dropped its weight by 30%.
In the previous model, one LED displayed all sensor functionality, which made it hard to know when the unit needed charging. A simple fix added to the Gen 2 sensor is a specific battery-level LED indicator that lets users know when to charge the sensor and indicates when it is fully charged. Core claims the sensor has a battery life of six days of active use and 30 days on standby.
Any owners of the first-generation Core sensor can participate in the brand trade-up programme, where they get 30% off the cost of the Gen 2 sensor (270 CHF) if they send back the old sensor. This promotion runs until June 30. The brand says returned sensors will be sent to research facilities to help with ongoing academic studies.
Pirelli launches a tube-type P-Zero Race RS tyre
Italian tyre manufacturer Pirelli didn’t have a completely new tyre to launch but rather a new tube-type model of its variation on existing tubeless-ready performance race tyre, the P-Zero Race RS.
“The tubeless RS has been the tyre of choice for our teams, but we still see demand for tube-type options,” explained Carlo Di Clemente, Pirelli’s road and gravel product manager. The tube-type version shares the same SmartEVO rubber compound and tread pattern as the tubeless model but uses a different internal structure. It’s available in 26, 28, and 30 mm widths — ending one size smaller than its tubeless sibling.
The tube-type Race RS removes the Speed Core layer that makes the TLR tyres airtight, and the bead can be made lighter, reducing the tyre's total weight (230 grams vs. 315 grams for a 28 mm tyre). With 50 grams of sealant, the tubeless set-up will weigh around 365 grams plus the weight of a valve, whilst the tube-type version with a 40-gram TPU tube will weigh around 280 grams.
Why launch a conventional clincher tyre? Although the pro peloton might be almost exclusively rolling on tubeless tyres these days, Pirelli explained that around 50% of its sales to consumers come from tube-type tyres. Even though the tyres are significantly lighter than the TLR version, the brand still positions this tyre as usable in the real world. The TechBelt casing used in the tyre construction acts as a dedicated puncture protection layer.
The new tyre is in Pirelli’s Milan-Bollate plant with 14% of the tyre's weight coming from natural rubber that is FSC certified. Currently, UK and US pricing is yet to be confirmed, but the tyre has been launched with an EU retail price of €80.
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