Pauline Ferrand-Prévot had already put the Gravaa adjustable tyre strain system to the take a look at on the Tour of Flanders however the actual advantages had been felt on Saturday’s Paris-Roubaix Femmes the place the Visma-Lease a Bike rider made her profitable debut.
“We tried it on the Tour of Flanders however the system was 400 grams heavier so I stated, ‘possibly however possibly not’,” Ferrand-Prévot, who got here second eventually weekend’s cobbled Basic, stated of the race which included 12 climbs. “For the cobbles of Paris-Roubaix there isn’t a query as a result of the load was not tremendous vital as it is a flat race.
“We had been very fortunate to have this technique.”
There was by no means any doubting the French rider already held a bonus on the roughest of terrain, delivered by the notoriously brutal cobbles, given the rider has simply switched again to the highway from mountain biking the place she holds 5 world titles and Olympic gold. Nevertheless, the adjustable tyre strain system, which varied members of the group have tried throughout quite a lot of races in latest seasons, added a noticeable edge within the 148.5km race to the Roubaix velodrome.
“For certain it was tremendous good to have decrease strain on the cobbled zones,” stated Ferrand-Prévot on the put up race media convention. “I might see that we had been far more snug, with much less leaping there was extra adherence on the again wheel.”
“To have the ability to pump (up the tyres) once more on the tarmac was tremendous good,” added Ferrand-Prévot, who made her escape from the main bunch on the highway however then dropped her break companion, Emma Norsgaard (Lidl-Trek), and prolonged the hole on the cobbles. “There have been a couple of instances the place there was various tarmac. On the finish of the race on the highway to complete, I had 4 bars and that makes a giant distinction.”
The Gravaa system, which our senior tech author examined on the cobbles of Roubaix this week, is managed by a pair of wi-fi buttons, one to deflate and one to inflate. Deflation is a fast course of whereas urgent the inflate button engages a crankshaft within the hub which compresses air and forces it into the tyres, taking round 800m to 1km to achieve one bar of strain.
Ferrand-Prévot stated she’d put in a substantial quantity of effort within the run as much as Saturday’s Monument to establish simply precisely the place she would modify the strain to ship the optimum benefit.
“I wanted to review a bit the place to need to strain up and extra,” Ferrand-Prévot stated. “For certain, the final 15km it helped lots. I had a strain of 4 bars within the tyre, whereas on the cobblestones, I used to be at 2.1 or 2.2.”
It was a relentless means of adjusting by way of the race with 17 cobbled sectors.
“I modified nearly each sector. It is tremendous fast if you put much less strain, it is ‘phshhh’ and goes down,” stated Ferrand-Prévot. “To go as much as 4 bars takes a couple of minutes, so it’s good to be affected person.”
Whereas Ferrand-Prévot and Marianne Vos – who had already ridden the system to victory on the UCI Gravel World Championships in 2024 – had been utilising the expertise at Flanders the boys’s group did not have it on board final weekend. That, nevertheless, is predicted to alter at Paris-Roubaix with Wout van Aert seen utilizing it on his remaining reconnaissance journey.
The query now could be whether or not he can deploy it simply as successfully as Ferrand-Prévot did to assist ship a profitable consequence for Visma-Lease a Bike on the 30 cobbled sectors of Sunday’s 259.2km males’s race too.
