New wheels

yanktanks

Hi all

I have just brought a specialized secteur sport triple and am looking to upgrade the wheels

One of the magazines recommended the mavic askium a,s which are about £200 but there are also the campaignolo
Socirroco 35s which are about the same price

Can anyone please help me on this or recommend anything else at this sort of price range

Regards
Martin

dj58

These seem popular at the moment!
viewtopic.php?f=40042&t=12975026

Bobbinogs

yanktanks wrote:

Hi all

I have just brought a specialized secteur sport triple and am looking to upgrade the wheels

What are you hoping to achieve?

yanktanks

Just hoping for more feel as the standard axis wheels are weighty and not very responsive
If I could save a few grams as we'll that's great

arlowood

DJ58 wrote:

These seem popular at the moment!
viewtopic.php?f=40042&t=12975026

+1 but save a bit over the winter and get the 2-way fit version then you have the option of running tubeless as well as normal clinchers + tubes.

http://www.wiggle.co.uk/campagnolo-zond ... -wheelset/

Your current wheels are better for riding over winter then treat youself in the spring

cycleclinic

go with the stiffer wheels they will perform better and the spokes will last longer. the sitffer wheel is not the mavic.

There is alot more to how a wheel performs than weight in fact weight should be the last thing you consider. Wheels need to be very stiff if they are of the low spoke count kind to offer long spoke life (high spoke count wheels that are stiff have even longer spoke life) and if you want them to "perform" i.e over some kind of maringal speed advantage then they need to be aero i.e low spoke count. How they feel is governed as much by how stiff they are as much as how much they weigh. Also rim width make a difference to the ride and how the bike handles but you don't get an option with rim width from campagnlo or shimano.

the problem with most reviews is they look at wheels from the wrong (in my opinion anyway) point of view. They seem to talk about how well they accelerate without quantifying it. I know a rider on a 2kg wheelset and a 1.5kg wheelset and ask then to accelerate from rest to 20mph at constant power the time taken is so close to being the same I doubt you would be able to measure the difference unless you have proper time keeping equipment it will be in the order of 0.10 secs for a 80kg rider pushing out an average 365W for the approxiatley 20s of acceleration. Thats an improvement of 0.5% wow how marginal is that. The thing is you don't ride that way and even if you rode the traffic lights in london that way you would get to the 8th set 1 sec quicker wow I wonder what you could do in that second on the Zonda that you couldn't do on the askiums.If you accelerate out of corners from 15mph to say 25mph all the time then aero drag is so much more significant than weight it can be ignored. In normal road riding accelerations will be less frequent and less severe.

So the most aero wheel out of the mavic askium or the Campagnolo scriocco is not the mavic. I hope that puts it into some sort of perspective. Lighter wheels do change the way the bike handles and that can be felt so that's all you are buying really at mere mortal level with lighter wheels unless you are getting a aero advantage from them.

Late Starter

As indicated above, stay on your current wheels through the winter and buy yourself some new one's in the spring. Personally, I don't think it's the best time of the year to splash out on new wheels. The roads in the autumn are at their most crappy and then after that, they get covered in salt!