Video: is aero kit faster?

Everyone's after those incremental gains! But instead of dropping two grand on some sweet wheels, what about if you just chucked a different kit on?

We've been having a go on dhb's new Aeron Lab Raceline 2.0 kit, which dhb claims is more aerodynamic, saving you precious watts which you can hold over for that final sprint. A combination of an uncompromising fit and some interesting technical fabrics come into play.

But does it make a difference? We decided to send Dave up to our local closed-road circuit to see if he could discern any meaningful difference in real-world conditions. And the video above is the record of his day. Have a watch to see how he got on. And if you haven't got time for that, you can read the spoiler below. Ready?

Well, the short answer is: yes. At 30km/h the Aeron Lab Raceline kit saved Dave 8W over a standard road kit. Which is a decent saving. Here's Dave talking us through the day...

Dave wrote:

So yeah: there's a meaningful saving to be had here based on my testing. The testing protocol was pretty simple: ride round the circuit in a fixed position (hands in the drops, arms locked straight) for ten laps, aiming to keep the laps as similar as possible. The circuit has two hairpins, a bit of rise and fall, and some wind, so it's not possible to just ride at a set pace all the way round. But it is possible to do a repeatable lap that's within a second or two of three minutes. The lap is 1.5km, so the average speed is almost exactly 30km/h.

My 10-lap average for the road.cc kit was 199W, and the 10 laps for the dhb kit were a 191W average, saving 8W. I changed back into the road.cc kit to sense-check the result and the average power went back up to almost the same (200W). I was also able to measure a small difference between wearing my Lazer Bullet aero helmet and my Lazer Z1 helmet (of 3W in favour of the Bullet), so taken all together those results suggest that the results here are repeatable. It's not wind-tunnel accurate of course, but it does seem to bear out all that wind tunnel testing in the real world.

I was on my own filming this one, so obviously the bits of footage of me riding around holding a selfie stick aren't actual footage of the recorded runs

Check out the kit on Wiggle - we'll be reviewing it independently, so watch out for that on road.cc.