First race of the season coming up and I haven’t been able to get the race wheels (first set of tubies) on the road for a shakedown. Decided to throw them on tonight and spin on the rollers a bit. They were awful, very loud and terrible amounts of rolling resistance. The tires are Conti Sprinters. Not the best I know, but I didn’t expect them to be this bad. Are all tubies horrible on rollers for some reason? What is going on here?
Low pressure?
did you glue them straight and was the glue dry?
I have some experience here. Some tubulars are smooth (VF Record, Vitt Crono, Vitt CX, …) and others feel very bumpy (Zipp) on rollers. One source of this is the overlap of the base tape which is much more prominent in some tires. Another could be the fit of the valve with typically bunched up base tape in the vavle hole - it’s a good idea to enlarge that slightly if necessary which of course is much more convenient if you check the fit without fresh glue on both tire and rim. The tires that I’ve tested that were bumpy on the rollers felt nice and smooth on the flat road. I don’t have a lot of direct measurement comparisons but I did test 2 of the original Zipp tubulars - one on a Zipp 900 was bumpy but the other on a HED 3C felt very bumpy - both measured Crr’s were basically the same. My theory is that the bump in the tire occurs only once per revolution so has minimal impact on the average power measurement. If you have a truing stand install the wheel and spin it looking for any hops in the tire. This might identify the areas which are causing the rough roller ride.