Sbradley11 wrote:
Personally I don’t have any data. However, Ineos seems to be very thoughtful in their equipment selection, so I take that as a sign they are quite good.
Not a big fan of Hed or Flo. Looking for a balance of aero, good hubs, weight and width.
Ineos talks a good game when it comes to marginal gains, but then some of their kit choices aren’t that optimal. For example, their old Kask Bambino’s were a helmet that worked well on very few riders and Dogma has never really been exceptional in terms of weight or aerodynamics.
Whether the Princeton wheels, and their whale bump design, are “fast” is a complete unknown because the company provides no comparative data. There is some data out there that pretty convincingly demonstrates that the Zipp wheels of similar design are not very fast. In fact I think it is Jim Manton at ERO who found that running the front wheel backwards is faster. JP Ballard at SwissSide also questions the merits of the design philosophy and discusses why in one of the Performance Process podcasts.
Whether the Reserve wheels are particularly fast is an unknown. While Visma ran the front wheel in the Tour TT last year, it sure looks like they were running a deeper AeroCoach front wheel a couple weeks back. The Reserve wheels have the really wide internal width, so if I had to guess part of their design goal is cornering grip. Vingegaard’s TT win at the Tour was partly down to how much faster he was railing those corners. For modern Grand Tour TTs, the courses just seem to be getting more and more technical, so weight, handling and grip are becoming more important. As an example Rob Gitelis of Factor bikes was saying that their riders are already asking for a bike that is more like the Shiv TT, even though the Hanzo is only 2 years old. On the other hand I don’t think Tri is ever going to have courses where aero isn’t king.
So as others have said, the Princeton and Reserve wheels may not be your best option.