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Mathieu van der Poel may have sucked the life out of the competition in Flanders on Sunday, but the tech scene was very much alive and kicking. As we discovered in part one of our Flanders tech roundup, there was much more interesting tech on show than first met the eye.
In this second gallery, we look at a new SRAM Red cassette, some aero kit, and a host of bike fits that confirm “progressive saddle positions” are currently on trend, as discussed on the most recent episode of Performance Process.
Picking up where we left off in the first Flanders tech gallery: handlebars. The BMC ICS Aero Integrated bar/stem equipped on Tudor Pro Cycling’s BMC Teammachine R bikes features a 12.5° drop flare and seems to both promote and enable some “aggressive” lever angles without falling foul of the new UCI 10° lever-angle limit. Many of the Tudor riders were adopting similar lever positions as seen here on Petr Kelemen’s bike.Sebastian Kolze Changizi had perhaps the most aggressive setup. But Matteo Trentin has never followed the aero handlebar trend, opting to stick with the classic round top, round drop two-piece handlebar and stem throughout his career across various teams and bike manufacturers. Michael Matthews raced Giant’s new TCR with the new Cadex Aero Integrated Handlebar. I’ll have a closer look at Matthews’ bike coming up in a gallery taking a closer look at several bikes that caught my eye in Antwerp.Cyrus Monk of Q36.5 Pro Cycling Team also prefers the classic round drop but built into a modern one-piece aero-tops carbon offering from Syncros on his Scott Foil. Tim Wellens is racing with the Enve SES one-piece aero bar stem with this lengthy stem option, which is most likely required due to his …… “progressive saddle position,” as discussed on the most recent episode of the Performance Process podcast. Wellens sets his saddle all the way forward on an in-line seatpost with zero setback. That forward saddle position will require a longer stem to maintain the same reach. Wellens’ saddle is just as interesting and seems to touch on another discussion point of that episode of the Performance Process with a soft, gel nose section presumably designed to reduce soft-tissue pressure. The saddle is Prologo’s Scratch NDR, listed as a Marathon/MTB offering on the brand’s website.
Prologo claims the large flat nose “provides a comfortable base of support even when it is necessary to pedal on the nose of the saddle” and that the cover features a “horizontally textured grip cover … to maximize grip and help maintain a forward position on the saddle.” The saddle also features a steep drop-off at the nose, presumably helping to get the very tip of the nose out of the way, aiding the rider in adopting more aggressive positions and torso angles without associated increase in soft-tissue pressure. Nils Politt on the other hand prefers the Prologo Nago saddle slammed all the way back on a set-back seatpost. Politt and Wellens essentially adopt polar-opposite saddle positions and – while clearly effective for each rider – the position philosophy is evident just by looking at each rider.Wellens (on the right in the left-hand image) is visibly further forward, which opens up his hip angle and rotates his pelvis forward. Politt (right image), on the other hand, is again pretty much the opposite with a much more posteriorly rotated pelvic position, closed hip angle, etc. Most riders sit somewhere between Politt and Wellens’ extreme ends of the saddle position spectrum. Mikkel Bjerg adopts a similar mid-setback position but also rides with what appears to be a Mikkel Bjerg-only extra-padded Prologo Dimension. Bjerg’s saddle appears otherwise identical to Prologo’s stock Dimension range but with much more padding. But many riders are trending towards a much more forward saddle position. Edward Theuns at Lidl-Trek is one example.While both Connor Swift and …… Ben Turner adopt forward and nose-down positions over at the Ineos Grenadiers. Maggie Coles-Lyster was one of the few riders on the Roland team with an inline seatpost on the team’s Pinarello Dogma F bikes. Coles-Lyster also chooses an ISM twin-nose saddle. Tim Merlier is racing with Specialized’s Phenom Comp with Mimic saddle this season. Specialized lists the saddle as a women’s offering, but as discussed on Performance Process, many men are turning to the soft tissue pressure relieving benefits of the “women’s saddles.”Merlier gets that Phenom Mimic pretty far forward on a positive “set-forward.” Another rider adopting the forward-trending saddle positions. Ineos Grenadiers riders have a host of Kask helmet options and it’s not unusual to see the squad line up with various different helmets. Both Sheffield and Swift opted for the Elemento, while others chose the Utopia, Protone, Valegro, Wasabit, and the new Aero and partially ear-covering Nirvana. Any more options and the team will need a helmet truck following them at races. Uno-X Mobility riders are still enjoying the once-discontinued Tucker MIPS TT helmet in road races. In hindsight, Uno-X and Sweet Protection were ahead of the curve using what is effectively a TT helmet in road races, with many following suit since, most notably POC.Visma-Lease a Bike riders on both the men’s and women’s teams all opted for 140 mm rotors front and rear for Flanders. We aren’t sure if this was specifically for Flanders or a shift that happened earlier this season, but it is a stand-out rotor choice in a sea of 160 front and 140 or 160 mm rear setups. Marianne Vos was one of the many riders opting for larger cassettes than we might typically see, presumably in anticipation of wet and slippy conditions on climbs, especially with the likes of a wet Koppenberg on course. The GOAT opted for a 10-36 Force cassette for Flanders …… matched to a 50:37 front chainring combination up front on 170 mm crankarms. The Lidl-Trek women all rolled out with SRAM’s new cassette, which we first spotted at last year’s Tour de France. The “RED” logo on this cassette now confirms that it is a new top-level road cassette. The hollowed-out sections suggest the new cassette may well be lighter than the existing RED cassette, and judging by what we saw at Flanders, it now adds a 10:36 option at Red-tier spec. The Lidl-Trek spare bikes featured SRAM’s existing 10-36 road block at Force level.Shimano riders were opting for the slightly smaller 34 sprocket option on the brand’s 11-34 cassette. Sticking with drivetrains for a second, Bahrain Victorious has joined UAE Team Emirates in racing with Carbon-Ti chainrings. Hopping back across to Lidl-Trek, Elisa Longo Borghini was aero head to toe for Flanders with Trek’s still relatively new Ballista MIPS aero road helmet, the Madone SLR 9 Gen 7 aero bike as you might expect, but the rider who eventually went on to win the race also opted for Santini’s aero-looking and latex-esque aero mitts, plus …… Santini’s aero overshoes.
