Did disc brakes get Pogacar dropped?

Gerbold wrote:

To write an article suggesting that a 200g difference between rim and disc options might have led to such an unexpected result is spurious at best. It's just ill-founded conjecture. 

The article doesn't suggest that at all, it investigates the possibility that it made a difference and concludes:

Quote:

The Col du Granon then was much more to do with legs, fuelling and team strategy than the weight of a Cadbury chocolate bar.

Always best to read all the way to the end before rushing to rubbish an article for something it never said.

Steve K wrote:

Given his rivals were also on disk brakes, the answer must be no, surely.

The thing is that Pogacar's Colnago with discs weighs 7.2kg, whereas the Pinarello Dogma F is right on the UCI limit of 6.8kg and JV's Cervelos are about the same. So I suppose the question is not did Pogacar's disc brakes cost him, but did Colnago's failure to build a bike that could be on the UCI weight limit with disc brakes cost him.

Yes, absolutely.  The question "did the extra weight of Pog's bike cost him" is a much more valid one.

Do you really think that those 100gr frame weight makes the difference ? I will help you. I have built a full on V3rs discs with the heavy frozen red paint in size 52s with 48/56 wheels weight 6.7kg including bottle cage  and Garmin mount.Campagnolo is heavier then dura ace, deda handlebar is heavier then advertised and found a stiff integrated alternative, seatpost can be changed by the zero setback that is considerably lighter, bora wheels are heavy, fit a rotor carbon crank with power2max meter and there you are. 
If you take the regular paint and size 50s take the darimo seatpost and lower height wheels you can easily go below 6.5kg

But thinking out of the box and not sticking to sponsors if they can't deliver makes you not able to meet the minimum

You do know that they're not allowed to ride bikes that weigh less than 6.8kgs, right? Not sure what point you're trying to make.

Rendel Harris wrote:

You do know that they're not allowed to ride bikes that weigh less than 6.8kgs, right? Not sure what point you're trying to make.

I'm very wel aware of that. The point I wanted to make is that you hear on several places that it is difficult to get the v3rs to the legal limit with discs and that is simply not true. Yup if you need to stick to your Italian brand yes but that can hardly be attributed to the frame. 

TheLonelyOne wrote:

5-10 seconds on Col du Granon. Then 3 more summit finishes on Alpe d'Huez, Peyragudes, Hautacam, so (if similar efforts needed) that 20-40 seconds across the Tour.

So it's not completely insignificant. Tours have been lost by less.

That's what I thought, 8 seconds over a 40 minute climb, 12 seconds per hour of climbing, how many hours of really hard climbs are there in the average Tour, 25? That's about 3 minutes 20s, considerably more than his current defecit. If he comes second by less than that margin it'll certainly cause debate. Along with the effect of G's gilet on the ultimate outcome, of course.

That's not how it works, though. Until he was dropped on the Granon it was pretty much about overall wattage expenditure. Depending on aerodynamics on disc vs rim, it's probably marginal.

Once he was dropped, he probably lost a handful of extra seconds. But weight isn't everything on a climb: power transfer and comfort play a part.

(I'd still want a 6.8kg bike for the mountain stages, though.)

lesterama wrote:

 But weight isn't everything on a climb: power transfer and comfort play a part.

Agree, but rim or disc aren't factors in those things.

lesterama wrote:

Until he was dropped on the Granon it was pretty much about overall wattage expenditure

Yep. They climbed Granon at a VAM of 1620 in 39 mins. Taking an extra 300g of mass upwards at that rate is 1.32W. (1620/3600 * 0.300 * 9.81) so firmly in the "marginal" range, but the same range of gain as a £700 OSPW Aero cage.

Having watched Pidcock descend as he did, I do believe that the disc system let him pull back way more than 5-10 seconds than if he was using rim brakes on carbon wheels, so it's all about trade-offs at the end of the day.

TheLonelyOne wrote:

Having watched Pidcock descend as he did, I do believe that the disc system let him pull back way more than 5-10 seconds than if he was using rim brakes on carbon wheels, so it's all about trade-offs at the end of the day.

I wonder (not disagreeing, just wondering); I saw a professional a while back (can't remember who I'm afraid, but a reasonable name) who said that they push it so close to the limit on downhills that quality of braking is not the most important thing, they were aiming to use the absolute minimum amount of brake they could get away with so neither system was being pushed anywhere close to the limit. If I recall correctly, he said if he was riding somewhere like an urban environment where he might have to make emergency stops he would take disc brakes every time, but on a full gas mountain descent in dry weather in a race he didn't really feel it made much odds. I wonder if anyone has comparative figures showing that riders are descending faster in the disc-brake era?

See my earlier messsage. " I can definitely brake harder and later, downhill on the same Strava sections with the disc brakes." I live in the Alps, on some of my descents you definitely need the brakes. Any mountain descent with hairpins you need to learn the art of descending, like Pidcock on yesterday's stage of the TDF. Go wide into the bend, brake late and hard, take the speed through the bend, accelerate after the apex.

This ^^^^^. Most of the descents in the Alps and Pyrenees have hairpin bends. Fast riders are absolutely taking their braking to the limits in order to descend said mountain as fast as possible. Quality disc brakes allow harder, later braking due to better modulation, with no possibility of overheating a rim, which is a factor if you aren't riding tubs (yes I know the pros are, or increasingly tubeless). Rim brakes on carbon rims are nowhere near as good as disk brakes with carbon rims.

Many don't believe this, especially on dry roads, but here is the evidence nicely demonstrated by GCN. https://youtu.be/BIwVbaLMezw

I was riding those exact same alpine roads the weekend before last and I loved my disc brakes. You can brake late with confidence and excellent modulation. The most technical descent of the day was glandon north side and the roadside was peppered with stopped rim brake riders who'd popped an inner tube through the rim getting hot.

Miller wrote:

The most technical descent of the day was glandon north side and the roadside was peppered with stopped rim brake riders who'd popped an inner tube through the rim getting hot.

Peppered? How many? Why didn't we see Tour riders twenty years ago continually blowing out their tyres due to hot rims when everyone had rim brakes? 

They all rode tubalars.

And they don't use their brakes like us very mortal, paranoid cowards.

ktache wrote:

They all rode tubalars.

Not always though, I can recall some teams switching to clinchers in the late 80s/early 90s, some believed that it was worth it to eliminate the risk of a tub coming unstuck. Certainly Systeme-U did due to their sponsorship from Michelin (though it was rumoured that on fast flat stages they were using tubs sprayed to look like Michelin clinchers). Chiappucci (sp?) won a stage in the early 90s on clinchers, and even in recent years Quickstep have been using tubed clinchers, with Alaphillippe winning on them in 2020. 

philsinclair wrote:

 I can definitely brake harder and later

Go and look at Pidcock's descent again, great descending is not about braking hard and late, it's about smoothness and maintaining momentum. Braking hard and scrubbing off all the kinetic energy you've built up and having to rebuild it is exactly what a great descender is trying not to do.

If discs are such an asset to fast descending, why haven't we seen disc brake riders in the past blowing away those still on rims? 

Tell that to Tom Pidcock. 

mrdoofer wrote:

Descending confidence is something you have made up. 

Risk compensation goes both ways.