Welcome back to the Win Tunnel. With the
prevalence of fully integrated race
bikes like our Venge, where all the
cables are run internally and hidden
away from the wind, a lot of you have
then asked, "Hey, how much are exposed
cables really worth?" And so to answer
that question we're gonna use a Roubaix
to figure that out for you. We want to
point out that the bike we're using
today is not ridable, we're just going
to show you guys the two extremes that
we can have. With the first condition
being our baseline, we're gonna use a
Roubaix with mechanical shifting and
hydraulic disk brakes, so there'll be
four exposed cables at the front of the
bike. For the second condition we're
going to remove only those exposed cables.
We also want to point out that there's
going to be no rider on the bike for
this test, that's because the cable
housing is upstream of the rider, and we also
want to ensure that this test has the
maximum amount of sensitivity so we can
provide you the cleanest and best data
that we can. For this test, the fans
will be run at about 45 kilometers an hour.
Great. Let's see what the difference is.
Well Jesse, the results are in, and
compared to the baseline with the full
external housing, removing them all
represented as savings of about 12
seconds over 40 kilometers. Just to
reiterate we know this is an extreme
case with an unridable bike, but if you
have external housing on your bike,
whatever you can do to tidy up those
cables is certainly going to help. That's
a great point. We just saw the importance
of having a clean cockpit and if you add
up the differences that we just saw with
the exposed cables and add in other
potential changes, like an aerodynamic
handlebar, those accumulated gains start
to become really significant, and on the
order of differences among bike frames
and forks. Totally, and it's nice for me
to see that my long nights here in the
Win Tunnel spent sitting on the couch
just paid off by cleaning up the cable
housing, and my mom knows that I hate
cleaning, like a lot, so I'm really glad
to see that clean cable housing that we
had Specialized have design has been
beneficial. That's awesome. Well, once
again, thank you for watching, and if you
have any questions for us here in the
Win Tunnel, please send them our way.
Thanks.
