A brief report from this weekends adventures.

Having travelled back to the flatlands of south Lincolnshire I was pleased to wake up to sunshine albeit with a gusting wind. I had a checklist of products which I needed to try while down south.

A (rare) hill:

Short, but they still hurt!

First up was the bottle with two lids. It fits beautifully in a Nissan Almera’s cup holder and securely in my bottle cages. Once out and about the seals we fine and the mouth piece soft but a bit fiddly to pull out with your teeth. One of its points is that it contains no BPA which is maybe/hopefully why it doesn’t smell like normal plastic bottles at first. These aren’t available on the website yet but don’t despair, you too will be able to get your hands on some very soon.

Next up was the combination of white gp4000’s and Zipp’s brake blocks for carbon rims. After initially squealing through a quiet junction I soon changed my riding style to anticipate more and brake as little as often. There’s no pretending that the braking power compared with metal braking surfaces is reduced but once adjusted, although I didn’t try, I’m sure emergency stops would be just as quick as normal. Once warmed up a bit the blocks seemed to perform better and more as expected without much grab. The slight dip in braking is more than made up for with the noise which carbon rims make while zipping along, no pun intended! The tyres performed well, I had 2 miles of newly laid chippings on my route and was very glad to emerge without even a nick in the tyres. On the slippy uphill ramps under trees they gripped as well as expected, and with the new blocks locking up under braking wasn’t a big worry!

On a side note the tyres in combination with white bar tape/slightly grey, my saddle and cages are also white look pretty cool (in a flashy/euro way):

Lots of white!

My ride went down to Corby Glen and then on to Ancaster and Hough and then back to Grantham. I only visited the verge once while spending most of the time fighting the gusting crosswind, sunny and very fast thanks to my new wheels (thanks fatty!) In the mood for racing this week, reports will hopefully follow…