Pro-Lite Introduces New Light Weight, Wide, and Tubeless Bortola A21 Road Wheel

That’s laughable . Wide? What a crock. That is narrower than my 2002 mavics.
I’m running Pacenti rims . And wide lightnings. Wide starts at a measly 21mm internal. Don’t waste your money. Wider is better. At least for wheels, working off the holiday width !

Mattbyke: Pacenti SL23’s have an internal width of18.0 mm.

I wish these rims were deeper and more aero. There aren’t many ~35mm deep rims that are wide.

Usual hater comments talk about digging yourself into a hole. I love my Pro-Lite wheels and I most certainly will checkinh these out as soon as they are available

Velo – you can’t have your cake and eat it too. This wheel is wide and low profile to keep rotational mass low. Keeping a shallower rim profile is an attempt to make the rim light enough that it offsets the weight penalty of adding more material to make it wider.

Your understanding of “aero” is flawed if you think that a wider wheel is more aero.
80%+ of the total air resistance of a wheel is based on the facing profile. That means that the more surface area it has that is facing the wind in front of it, the more resistance it has. If you want more aero, don’t get a wider rim.

Read up on computational fluid dynamics and how they relate to wind tunnel readings. They really need to be considered together in order to get a good picture of things. Wind tunnel results are typically used in aerospace to confirm the CFD models. CFD models use precise things like numbers and formulas to understand what is happening and predict what will happen when variables are changed. CFD models typically show between 80 and 90% of the wind resistance coming from the frontal surface area, with the rest divided between surface drag and a bit of trailing edge drag. Interestingly, spokes are almost always ignored as well because their influence falls well below the margin for error.

Wider is better for rolling resistance (ie speeds under 25~30kph), depending on rider weight and tire pressure, but for aerodynamics, it will always have more resistance.

A deeper profile will help mitigate some of the trailing edge turbulence, but given the reynolds numbers at “bicycle” speeds and the fact that you’re talking about percentages of percentages of percentages, you’re still going to be just fine. Aerodynamically, a narrow rim with a shallow profile will beat a wider rim with a little deeper profile.

This wheel allows a wider tire and tubeless, with a shallow profile rim to get the weight low – especially the rotational mass. But it’s not a deep dish wheel.

The wheel will feel fast, light and very snappy as a result of the straight pull spokes. It will be a good climber, good on cobbles and good all-purpose wheel for long rides too.

If you really feel like you need a wider rim, perhaps just get yourself a slightly wider tire. The difference between a 17.2 and an 18mm rim is much less than the difference between a 13.xmm ID rim and a 17.2mm rim. There’s more than one way to skin a cat.

But be warned. Get too wide and you’ll start to increase the surface contact area too much, requiring higher pressure, which will lead you into “bounce” and energy loss and other problems too… Moderation is a good idea until someone comes out with a scale of weight-pressure-rimID-tire combinations in 5psi increments. There comes a point where a wider rim is no longer the best choice. Otherwise, we’d just get to the point where we should all be putting Large Marge’s on our road bikes…

Let’s clarify a few things:

Straight pull spokes are no more rigid than j-bend spokes and really have no significant effect on wheel feel on their own. Once a j-bend spoke is bedded into the hub flange and the spokes are stress relieved, the bend is essentially rigid.

At a given pressure, the contact patch of the tire has the same area regardless of the rim width. The shape of the contact patch changes, becoming shorter and wider as the rim widens, but the area of contact remains the same.

The higher volume of air in a tire on a wider rim allows one to reduce the tire pressure without increasing the risk of pinch flats. This creates a larger contact patch for better cornering traction and the lower pressure tires conform to pavement irregularities better, improving ride quality.

Wider tires (25mm) typically have lower rolling resistance than narrow tires (21-23mm), which is one of the reasons for the current trend toward wider rubber. There is a point of diminishing returns somewhere, but it’s apparently beyond the tire widths that will fit in a typical road racing frame.