We've taken a look at some of the lightest tech in the cycling world right now.
Ultralight cycling tech
FCCS custom shoes
FCCS specialises in manufacturing rare custom cycling shoes that make your standard riding kicks looks downright heavy.
The brainchild of a chap called Jack Lee, there are no standard sizes as every shoe is moulded exactly to your feet, creating a truly bespoke fit that’s supposed to be much comfier than all that bare carbon suggests.
This pair was made for a lucky person called Jason and each shoe weighs around the 150g mark, however a quick look on Jack’s instagram account shows he’s getting close to making a sub-100g shoe.
Sole stiffness is approaching Bont levels of give, or lack of it, so you can be sure you won’t be wasting any of those precious watts.
The price? Just under thirteen hundred of your English pounds for the pair.
Extralite HyperStem
There are plenty of companies who make lightweight stems, but they’re often rendered in carbon fibre and come with limits on where they can be used and who can use them.
We’re not sure how they did it, but Italian company Extralite has managed to make an aluminium stem that weighs just 88 grams for a 120mm size.
What’s more astounding is that Extralite claims you can use this stem for cross-country and even enduro racing. The idea of riding something so svelte during an enduro stage sounds a little scary to us, but for those road and XC lightweight builds a Hyper Stem could be just the ticket.
Schmolke TLO 30 Tubular wheelset
Weighing a mere 940g for the pair, Schmolke’s TLO, or ‘the lightest only’ tubular wheelset sits on the super-light-but-not-hyper-light end of the spectrum. What sets these wheels apart is that they come with very little compromise for such a weight weenie product.
The weight limit of 105kg surpasses many heavier wheels from other competitors, and the rim width is a decent 25mm.
This means you’re getting a low weight wheel that’s incredibly stiff and can handle wider tyres. Or, in other words, the perfect mountainous Sportive or Grand Fondo wheelset.
Obviously they’re not cheap, coming in just over 2,000 euros depending on spec. But when you compare this to the likes of Enve and Zipp’s latest offerings that price starts to seem a bit more reasonable.
Trek Emonda SLR Disc
Trek shook up the cycling world when it released the Emonda way back in 2014, at the time the frame’s claimed weight of 690g was about as light as they come.
With that in mind it’s no surprise that Trek pulled out all the stops to drop the new Emonda’s frame weight down to 640g for 2018. But what is surprising is that it's managed to make the disc equivalent just 20g heavier at 660g.
This means you can get all the benefits of discs and easily fall under the UCI’s minimum weight limit of 6.8kg.
Perhaps 2018 will be the year we see a disc bike win a mountainous grand tour stage, and it would be no surprise if it was the Emonda SLR Disc.
THM Clavicula SE crank
Long known for making some of the lightest bike components around — and having one of the worst logos in cycling — THM Carbones has received a visual update in 2018.
The Clavicula SE crank is a stand out product weighing just 302g. For reference, that’s less than half the weight of a Dura Ace crank.
You’d think there would be a loss of stiffness on such a slight product, but the Clavicula comes with a rider weight limit of 120kg, so should be stiff enough for even the most powerful of riders.
The only problem for a product that weighs half as much, you also pay over twice as much as a Dura-Ace crank. There’s no doubt true weight weenie(ism) comes at a cost.
