Upgrading your bike often promises performance gains, increased enjoyment or, at the very least, some style points.
Unfortunately, not all upgrades are created equal or live up to expectations, with many destined for the spare parts drawer or classified listings.
We’ve come together to look back at some of the worst road upgrades we’ve ever bought to help you consider if it’s worth taking the risk.
- Eight of the best upgrades you can make to your bike – without breaking the bank
- 12 road bike upgrades you don’t need (and why)
Liam Cahill – off-brand Oval Chainrings
The year is 2013 and Chris Froome is dominating the Tour with a set of Asymmetric chainrings that promise to give you more power, fix your dead spot, or just make you faster.
I fell hook, line and sinker for the marketing, but as an impoverished student, I didn’t have money for a branded set of oval rings from the likes of Rotor.
Instead, I headed to eBay in search of a bargain.
There I found Doval chainrings, which seemed like they’d do the job just for a fraction of the price.
Once they arrived, I went about fitting them, and this is where my problems began.
My rings hadn’t come with quite the right parts needed to install them. As a result, I raided my dad’s parts bin for washers but had to file these down to make them fit.
With the rings finally fitted I tried to get the front derailleur to shift. Let’s just say that the result wasn’t optimal and I dropped many chains.
To complete my woes, the chainrings had no discernable impact on my power or race results, which continued to be unremarkable.
Warren Rossiter – an ultra-light cassette (and other weight weenie 'upgrades')
Let me take you back to the heyday of the weight weenie wars – I’m talking 1999, pre-millennium, Prince’s biggest payday, and a bug that never happened.
It was the early days of carbon fibre, but aluminium ruled the roost.
Everyone was obsessed with shaving grams from their bikes but, as I found out shaving lots of weight didn’t make for a better bike – and in lots of cases just made it much, much worse.
My much-loved Storck Scenario bore the brunt of my hubris.
Over a few years I ‘upgraded’ and tweaked this alloy beauty to at one point get it under 6kg – no mean feat for a 58cm aluminium bike.
Along the way, I changed lots of small parts at great expense to drop grams.
There were some highlights: though they were riotously expensive and fiddly to fit, Nokon cables looked amazing and you can run much tighter bends than standard cables and therefore use less cable, and save extra weight.
Lightweight latex innertubes had their place, and carbon bars brought more than just low weight to the game too.
Then there was the bad... where do I start?
Lightweight quick-release skewers (remember them?) generally used a titanium rod with a cam-actuated lever.
These never clamped as well as standard Shimano or Campagnolo levers and certainly didn’t quick-release either.
Then there are lightweight bolt-kits, either in aluminium anodized, titanium or, in extreme cases carbon fibre.
Alloy bolts rounded off easily, Ti bolts often welded themselves in place due to galvanic corrosion and carbon bolts were just stupid.
However, by far my dumbest ‘upgrade’ was to an ultralight 9-speed cassette machined from a single billet of aluminium from a long-forgotten brand.
This replaced a sensible (12-26t!) and rather lovely Campagnolo Record cassette.
The new cassette saved 135g, set me back a few hundred pounds and, as I recall, shifted ok – not as good as Campy, but fine.
The downside was the tall 11-21 range – fine for a flat-time trial, not so for regular riding.
11-21 combined with my odd chainring choice of 54/40 gave some gears that were too tall for me.
On a trip to visit my Italian in-laws in 2001 and an ill-fated attempt to ascend the Stelvio, all of the weight savings in the world didn’t do anything to offset my stupid gearing.
After suffering on an all-day solo attempt, I vowed to get gears I could comfortably use and not worry about dropping grams on my bike.
When I look back all this money and effort achieved was coffee stop bragging rights and seriously lightening my wallet.
Simon von Bromley – Cheap carbon tubular wheels
As someone who has always poured religiously over cycling media, most of the countless upgrades I’ve bought over the years have been carefully curated.
In hindsight, though, the set of Planet X CT45 tubular carbon wheels I purchased from the eponymous brand in the summer of 2013 (for around £400-500 – the exact price eludes me), didn’t really fit that bill.
The wheelset consisted of a set of 45mm-deep unbranded carbon tubular rims, laced with Pillar aero spokes to a set of Planet X-branded hubs, running on basic steel cartridge bearings.
On trend for the time, the rims were 25mm-wide and designed for 25mm road bike tyres – a size which was, quaintly, considered large for a road racing bike back then.
Why tubulars? Because they were cheap, light and you can’t beat the ride feel of tubs (or so almost everyone said back then).
In reality, they were – of course – a total pain in the arse.
I had initially planned to use tubular tape to simplify the process of securing tyres to the rims, but since I’d be using them for criterium racing, wise heads in my cycling club told me that was a stupid idea.
So, I glued my own tubs – initially a set of Schwalbe Ultremo HTs, then later a set of much nicer Vittoria Corsa CX IIIs – and still worried constantly about the front one rolling off at Crystal Palace crits.
As with most carbon rims of that era, the wet weather braking was also astonishingly poor with the supplied brake pads.
Upgrading to SwissStop Yellow King brake pads helped somewhat, but if anyone was wondering why road bikes switched to hydraulic disc brakes not long after carbon wheels became somewhat mainstream, there’s your answer.
The Planet X CT45s definitely looked the part on my 2009 Giant TCR Advanced SL, but I don’t think they made me any faster.
Especially given they replaced a set of Shimano Ultegra 6700 clincher wheels with Continental’s legendary GP4000S II tyres and latex inner tubes – a fine combination for the time.
In truth, I don’t think the weight savings conferred by the tubular rims made any difference at all, and the hassles of glueing tyres and not being able to brake effectively simply weren’t worth any potential aero gains.
Thank the cycling Gods clincher and tubeless tyres are actually faster than tubs in most scenarios.
After using the CT45s for a year or so of racing, one of the rims broke in a crash and it probably speaks volumes that I took the incident as an opportunity to quietly retire them.
Jack Luke – TPU tubes
TPU, or Thermoplastic Polyurethane inner tubes have become popular substitutes for those yet to succumb to the world of road tubeless.
With the proposed benefits of lighter construction, lower rolling resistance and increased puncture, on paper, TPU tubes seem to be an inexpensive no-brainer upgrade.
Unfortunately, my experiences haven't quite matched my expectations.
Unlike their butyl rubber counterparts, TPU tubes often require brand-specific patches and glue to fix a puncture – an inevitability no matter your preferred way of holding air in your tyre – making them a pain for touring or bikepacking.
Though testing puncture resistance feels as much about luck as tech, I've also found that they don't truly live up to their claims of increased performance here.
Some TPU tubes come with other unexpected drawbacks.
In the pursuit of ultimate lightness and recyclability, Schwalbe Aerothan tubes use a composite valve.
I have managed to snap two of these in the heat of a roadside puncture repair.
Though an admittedly niche problem, I also deformed and rendered unusable another tube when replacing the stock valve core with a third-party pressure sensor – an issue I've never had with an alloy valve stem.
If you're still rolling around on clincher-only rims, I can see why someone may opt for TPU tubes over butyl.
But given tubeless tech is now so reliable, I'll be giving TPU tubes a swerve in future.
