How Much Faster Do Pro Cyclists Ride Downhill?

Pro cyclists descend at death-defying speeds, hitting speeds over 100KPH with just skinny tires and thin lycra being all that separates them from the road! So how do beginners and amateurs compare? With the help of our friends at@RideShimanowe’ve been finding out!

In association with @RideShimano👉 https://gcn.eu/Shimano

Welcome 0:00
Where are we cycling? 0:29
How well do amateur cyclings descend? 1:49
How good are pro cyclists 3:04
How do bike brakes work? 3:18
Ollie’s downhill run 4:55
The results 6:26
Deeper dive 7:23

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Pro cyclists descend at death defying speeds speeds of over a 100 kilm an hour a common place with just skinny tires and thin Lyra being all that separates them from the road but how do the rest of us compare well we have a rapid descent an amateur and a pro and me

To make this video possible today we have the support of Shimano which is cool because it allows us to highlight the differences between their mid-tier 105 and top tier J Ace components when it comes to breaking and descending and our descent today is El Angels near Jona

In Spain this descent is 5 km and the fastest time is 4 minutes 38 seconds held by Casper Anderson it’s a great descent that averages 6.1% with lots of fast flow blowing Corners now in videos we’ve done in the past people have complained that I’m too good now to be

The amateur which is kind of a compliment but for this video we’ve recruited another here he is his name is Joe and he’s from chelham in England he’s been cycling for about 10 years and has had a go at some road races and has a few epic rides under his

Belt and this is our Pro Frenchman Alexi brunal he is a weapon he’s ridden for the world tour teams group armor fdj and UAE team Emirates and now rides for pro gravel team Groove gravel he’s 70 kg and has an FTP of over 400 watts but he

Can’t say squirrel oh and um seeing as I’m here I’m going to have a go to Joe how’s your how’s your descending yeah I’m a bit of a wimp on the descents but um I’m confident that now the sun’s out and it’s dried up a little bit uh I can

Probably get down there pretty quick beep beep beep beep beep and he’s off don’t crash yeah I felt good felt quick quick nice and dry no Stones so uh yeah I’m confident I got a pretty good time next it was the turn of our Pro Alexis beep beep beep

Beep while the guys are doing their runs let me tell you a little bit more about the brakes in detail because they are the most critical piece of equipment when it comes to descending and descending is all about heat dissipation it’s turning the kinetic energy of your motion as you descend and converting

That into heat energy and then trying to dissipate that so the bigger you are as you descend or the faster you descend the more kinetic energy you have and therefore the greater requirement for heat Dissipation if we look at their brake pads inside the caliper you can see they’ve got these little fins all over them like a little mini radiator and that’s exactly the point it’s designed to increase the surface area so that they can better dissipate Heat and the

Rotors have a load more Tech going on than you might think so they have something called ice Technologies freezer is what Shimano calls it and the rotor is actually a sandwich construction of stainless steel and aluminium and this is designed to maximize the material properties of those different Alloys to give the

Optimum well stiffness of the rotor but also heat dissipation so the outer bit is actually stainless steel and then the inner layer that’s the aluminium extends inwards into these fins which are designed to dissipate the Heat and that’s the aluminium bit and the black coating on there I thought

That was just like a bit more cosmetic for Jor Ace no it’s not it’s actually a special um heat dissipating coating according to Shimano that’s enough chat anyway um I’m going to go do my run I’m also fortunate to have your Ace on my bike So Pro level kit even though I’m

Not a a pro beep beep beep Beep With the servo wave the initial pad movement when you pull the lever is light it doesn’t move as much but then as you pull the pads on harder you get greater movement greater stopping power in short what it means is that the well the braking power is not linear it

Allows you to have sort of finer tuned control with light braking which is really great when you’re hitting you know flowing corners and you just want to feather the brakes and just put a little bit on just to really modulate your Speed right we’ve all done our descents I’ve got the results guys um so first up Joe you did The Descent in 5 minutes 35 seconds right with a maximum speed of 67 km/ hour okay next is me 5 30 7 so he beat me by two

Seconds I had a maximum speed of uh 68 and a bit kilometers R so my maximum speed is a bit faster so I wonder anyway next up don’t you laugh cuz you might not have yeah right you did it Alexis in five 29 maximum speed of 71 and a bit km per

Hour that’s so bad yeah that’s pretty pretty fast quite a bit faster than us yeah to analyze the results in a bit more detail I needed my laptop and strava’s Analysis tools so back to the apartment so I’ve just been doing some analysis on straa and we our descent

Today was dry um it’s also very fast flowing descent so there are not many hard breaking zones where you’re really putting that heat dissipation to the test you would see that more on steeper descents that have some very tight Corners such as hair pin turns but

Looking at stra we can analyze how we descended and what’s proper cool is using the flyby features you can see where we gained time or lost time relative to each other um you can also see the the slowest times for Less experienced Riders we were all around

The sort five and a half minute Mark but there’s a lot of people who are going down that in around 10 minutes who are a lot less experienced at descending and probably more sort of beginner cyclists that’s quite a significant amount of time and that said there is an argument

That beginner cyclists need and will likely benefit from better heat dissipation because they’re probably a bit more scared and as a result they you know don’t want to go too fast and they they’re dragging the brakes quite a bit more which is causing a lot more uh heat

Buildup um than pro riders or more experienced Riders so when we look at us though uh I can see here that what’s interesting is when Alexis descends and you can see this on the footage as well through some of the corner sections he’s just holding so

Much more speed than myself and Joe he’s being more efficient and breaking less whereas you can see in particular in the case of Joe he’s having a putting a lot more power down on on the straights and then breaking harder and taking a lot more power off going slower through the

Corners and then accelerating again out of the corners and this is using more energy it’s less efficient and I guess that’s a a really interesting difference that although the time difference isn’t massive between us it highlights something that’s different between someone who’s among the world’s best and has descended at the highest

Level compared to people like Joe and myself who are Keen amateur and you know very experienced but just not on that same level in more ways than you might think although I’m I’m pretty happy with that we’re around sort of 700 out of 42,000 so yeah I I’ll take that another

Interesting detail we spotted on the break cam was that Alexis was far better at judging and modulating his speed heading into the corner whereas Joe and I tended to have to make more Corrections mid corner and we tended to use just one break relying more on the

Front Alexis used both well big thanks to Alexis and Joe for their time today and well for you know putting me in my place again and back to back to being dropped and uh well let us know in the comments what you thought of the results

And if you were surprised by the time differences did you think they were going to be bigger or smaller I’m going to go now and hopefully you found uh this informative love you bye it’s good view that isn’t it