Describe your TT setup

ryanspeer

My first race, a TT, is coming up in a couple of weeks, and I'm curious what everybody's TT setup generally looks like. I'm sure some of you have your dedicated TT bike, but for the rest of you that have to retrofit your RR bike, what do you do? Throw a disc rear wheel, aero helmet, aero bars and call it good, or do you go further? How much further?

bikeguy

Well, last summer I rode a few TT's on a Bianchi Nirone Xenon system with standard cowhorn with clip on FSA aerobars and a front Zipp 404 and some standard Ambrosio rear wheel. Tires were Vredestein Tricomp clinchers. Brakes and shifters on the bullhorns.
This year I will have a Argon 18 TT frame using a Shimano 105 complete set, a forward facing set of cowhorns with the FSA clip ons and shifters on the aerobars. Mavic CXP 33 rear wheel and ultegra hub and the same Zipp 404 front. I also rode with mountain bike shoes with a soft sole, now I have a pair of racing carbon sole shoes that don't flex. The tires will be Michelin Pro race 2 clinchers.

I'm really looking forward to when the snow melts, I've been training marginally hard and have had great gains already.

-bikeguy

Catabolic_Jones

I used to just run my road bike with clip-ons for a couple of years, and I improved steadily. Assuming you already have clip-ons, the biggest time savings is an aero helmet. Even little things like going without gloves, using booties, wearing a skin suit will help. Run your water bottle on the seat tube, not the down tube. Wheels are not totally unimportant but perhaps the last consideration after these simpler measures have been attended to.

Anyway, this year I got a beautiful P2C and am going to run a Hed/Hed3 combination. I've got it on the trainer right now in a fairly aggressive position. We'll see how that goes. I'm also looking forward to May, which is when our time trialing season begins.

__________________
It takes a big man to cry, but it takes a bigger man to laugh at that man.

bannerrefugee

I have a dedicated bike now, but in the past I used smallish clip on bars and a chaero disk (at the time 60$ from co cyclist), and an old style cosmic front wheel (30 cm deep and about 18 bladed spokes also fairly heavy). I had the fastest bike time at a tri with 400 participants. To be fair I only did the bike, and only beat about 20 others that also did the team tri thing.

This set up was used several times on rolling hills, no mountains and in the case of the above mentioned time trial with fairly strong wind. I would also train with it frequently befoe TT's. I do not use the disk anymore as I have moved to the midwest and here we frequently have 30+ mph winds. If you use chaero it must be with a nondeep rear wheel.

__________________
Semi Professional Advice
(Free of Charge)