Cyclist
In the Drops: Hunt wheels, Vittoria tyres, MilKit sealant, Giro kid’s helmet and the best Christmas movie
Aha! Oho! Tracks in the snow! Whose are these tracks and where do they go? A wheel poked out of a muddy dyke, could this be the wheel of a lightweight bike?
Only one way to find out, head on over to our best lightweight road bikes reviewed page, which does exactly what it says on the tin and which is my second favourite Cyclist page this week. Because what’s not to like about a 6.5kg Factor O2 VAM?
But hey, I haven’t even said hey yet. So heya! Wavey emoji! It’s Friday! The second to last Friday before Christmas, giving you plenty of time to still buy that cyclist in your life (or just yourself) a lovely, bikey Christmas gift. Just check out our Christmas gift guide, it’s like the Argos catalogue for the modern rider, worth a read on the toilet even if you’re not in the market for a new sofa or Star Wars dust cap.
My favourite number one story this week is that of the original bicycle, which has been meticulously rebuilt by some seriously crafty and dedicated folk and pedalled – sorry, treadled – 60 miles from Dumfries and Galloway to Glasgow. It’s a beautiful thing, and a lovely read. Now, onto my In the Drops picks…
Hunt Limitless UD Carbon Spoke wheels
Hunt’s Limitless 48mm deep tubeless rims promise to be ‘the fastest sub-50mm rims in the world’. Are they? Well, I’ve swapped them into the Look 765 Optimum I’m currently testing and it’s been like blowing pepper up the nose of a Grand National horse. These things are rapid, but if the market is to be believed, they ought to be.
Snub-nosed, with 22.5mm internal width and 35mm external, the Limitless profile is about as wide as they come. That means the 28mm Vittorias I’m running (more on them below) come up close to 30mm, and that also means you better have some serious chainstay clearance as a rim that bulges to 35mm is wide (NB the bulge is up the rim wall, the bead-to-bead outside edge measurement is more like 31mm).
Though the Limitless rim has been around a while, this set of wheels gets carbon spokes (UD means unidirectional – basically each spoke is made of bundles of straight fibres running in the same direction, like tiny black spaghetti). The upshot is a lighter wheel than the steel spoked version, which weigh 1,618g verses the carbon spoke pair at 1,511g.
That’s a claimed weight, as I really didn’t want to take off the pre-installed rim tape to weigh them. Which is a nice point in fact, Hunt ships the Limitless UDs with with preinstalled rim tape and tubeless valves.
What isn’t here, as it is in other Hunt wheels, are the spare spokes, because these carbon ones aren’t easily user-serviced, albeit they stand to be stronger than steel while weighing just 2.7g each (a comparable steel spoke is around 3.5g, and when you have 38 of the things, it all adds up). Hunt reckons the overall effect is a wheel with ‘up to 30% more responsiveness’, which I take to mean stiffer. And indeed these things are, they pick up brilliantly.
This test pair has steel EZO bearings, but a CeramicSpeed upgrade is yours for an extra £350 RRP – though right now there’s 15% off these wheels plus a further £40 if you sign up to the newsletter. Not that I’m trying to sell these to you, but they are very good, and very fast. The Look will be sad to swap back to its shallow sections.
- RRP £1,649
- Buy from Hunt Wheels (£1,649)
Cyclist Magazine Podcast
Shameless plug time as I present this and our latest episode is a corker – a chat with ex-pro Adam Hansen, who rode 20 back-to-back Grand Tours, made his own 76g carbon shoes, rode for Cavendish and Greipel and is now president of the CPA – the professional cyclists’ union. It was a fascinating insight into the minds of the professionals, from contract negotiations to inter-team rivalries to dusty old mechanics set in their ways. I can’t recommend enough (though I would say that). And it’s free!
(And it’s also full of loads of other great interviews with Greg LeMond, Tyler Hamilton, Lizzie Deignan, Chris Boardman, Pippa York, Orla Chennaoui… the list goes on, and it’s a perfect place to escape to when the Christmas gathering gets too much.)
- Free now from everywhere you get podcasts, or the Cyclist website
Vittoria Corsa Pro Control tyres
These are the beefed up version of Vittoria’s ever popular – and Tour de France and Paris-Roubaix winning – Corsa Pros. They’re tubeless, made from the same 320tpi cotton carcass and made with the same hybrid process of partial vulcanisation. Where previous Corsas had the tread glued on, the new Corsa Pros and Corsa Pro Controls have their tread vulcanised to the carcass, a process that tends to make for harder wearing tyres.
By ‘beefed up’, I mean Vittoria has extended the tread width, bead-to-bead, by a few millimetres and the overall tread thickness by a fraction, resulting a weight of 301g per tyre. There are also sipes on the shoulders, designed to shift water and boost grip, and like the standard Corsa Pro sibling, the bead is reinforced to play better with sharp-edged tubeless rims and there is a breaker layer under the tread for puncture protection.
Crucially, Vittoria has tweaked the Corsa’s graphene/silica compound to perform better in cold, wet conditions. So where the Corsa Pros are most at home descending Ventoux in the sunshine, the Corsa Control Pros want for nothing more than a beastly day in the UK countryside.
I’ve reviewed the Corsa Pro Controls in issue 148 of Cyclist – shout out to the magazine, paper till I die! – so head on over to your local shop to read all about it when it appears on the newsstands early in the new year or, better still, subscribe.
But for just the headlines, know these are great tyres. Very expensive, like eye-wateringly expensive (I got new a car tyre the other day and it was £75 and some bloke called Rick installed it), but in strictly performance terms, the Controls are really very good. And the tanwalls don’t stain as badly as they used to either, and they’re not that hard to fit. Expect to use levers though, and to need a few rides before they hold pressure acceptably. But that’s tubeless!
- RRP £89.99 (each)
- Buy now from Wiggle (from £61.99)
MilKit tubeless sealant
I’ve long been a fan of MilKit, whose sealant syringe, which comes as part of its Valve System, still regularly comes out of my toolbox some six years after it arrived. This is MilKit’s tubeless sealant, a blend of sealing milk and microfibres designed to help fill holes more effectively. The Swiss company reckons lasts for at least five years in the bottle, even once opened, and which doesn’t coagulate as quickly as competitors, and when it does ‘leaves no rubbery leftovers’. Come back to me in five years to find out if any of that’s true, but in the meantime, know this seems as good a sealant as any – it went in the tyre, it sealed the tyre – and MilKit has long been a trustworthy brand in the tubeless world as far as my experience goes.
I can also vouch for its tubeless tyre inflator ‘Booster’ bottle as being simple and brilliant for those without a compressor (ie, just about everyone except for Rick at the car tyre place).
For reference, this is a 250ml bottle which I’ll get four road bike tyres out of. MilKit recommends ’40-80ml per road bike – gravel bike tyre’. I’d rather a bit of extra weight for the puncture security, so I opt for 60ml in a road bike tyre up to 32mm. Gravel I’d plump for at least double. Each to their own.
- Buy now from Tredz (£18.50, 250ml)
Giro Scamp helmet
I bought this for my little girl, partly because I have a penchant for Giro lids, mainly because it was the smallest, non-but-isn’t-that-cute-it’s-got-ears infants helmets going. That means it’s a size XS 45-49cm, whereas the next best thing, the Lazer P’Nut, starts at 46-50cm.
Weight is a feathery 187g, and I know this because I am a cyclist first, father second (I think that’s the right way round). The buckle is a ‘pinchguard’ buckle, which is like the ratchet-type straps on old bike shoes, and the retention system is a small-hands version of the Roc Loc cradle found on Giro’s top end adult helmets.
The biggest purchasing influence, of course, was the colour. I searched high and low for kids lids not covered in seahorses or rainbows and there aren’t that many. However, I’ve just revisited Giro’s site to brush up on the specs here and it says ‘since the Scamp is available in a range of kid-friendly colours and designs, let your child pick out their favourite so they’ll be excited to wear it every time they ride’. Hmm, perhaps this isn’t about me after all. But in my defence, she is nine months and spends more time eating the stoppers on my water bottles than making sartorial kit choices. It’ll come.
- Buy now from Giro (£34.99)
What we’re into this week: Beat Street (1984)
Best Christmas movie? Die Hard is up there. Bruce, dubious-accent Jeremy and the psycho guy with the long hair… Yippee-Kiy-Yay mother trucker. But have you heard of Beat Street? It’s any 80s film about DJs, breakdancers and graffiti artists just trying to get by in the Bronx, living their non-conformist dreams and supporting an unplanned family. It’s got incredible break battles and party scenes, and a stellar cast including Afrika Bambaataa, Melle Mel, Kool Herc and Doug E Fresh. And it is heart-warming as it comes, and the soundtrack is amazing. In another world this isn’t a Christmas movie at all but a hip-hop musical. I can’t recommend it enough this Christmas.
- Watch it now on Amazon Prime
And that’s a wrap. Thanks for a wonderful year, dear readers. Mwah, clap on the back hug.
The post In the Drops: Hunt wheels, Vittoria tyres, MilKit sealant, Giro kid’s helmet and the best Christmas movie appeared first on Cyclist.