Lots of Shimano Goodies
The full announcement from Shimano is <here> but in a nutshell ‘lots of goodies’.
Of particular interest to me is their first foray into power meters with the FC-R9100-P which is a PM-in-a-spider (drive crank body) delivering left- and right-side, dual-band power with strain gauges in each crank arm. It has rechargeable batteries (performance TBC) but recharging is enabled without the need to remove covers. Also, as Shimano points out, chainrings can be removed without changing accuracy. I’m not yet clear on the support for elliptical chainrings/frequency of measurement per stroke.
Will it be accurate? (Probably!! +/- a per cent or two – as ‘normal’)
Also of note is the DURA-ACE R9100 watt-saving wheels set, apparently saving 16w in ‘real world’ scenarios over the DURA-ACE 9000 C50 wheelset and they look quite nice too!.
Other bits: hydraulic road brakes, digital shifting and also a degree of automatic shifting of the front/rear derailleurs depending on what shift is made (ie shift the front and the back might automatically change..clever)
Why on earth would I want hydraulic brakes on a road bike? There is literally nothing wrong with road brakes, they are a solved problem. All this futzing about has actually held me off buying a new bike for a few years rather than making me buy a new one – I’m waiting for the fittings to standardise and for them to make up their mind between traditional, DM, disk, hydraulic etc.
And after all this effort, the braking surface of the tyre is still only 3mm wide and locks up immediately :o/
ahh…the next innovation will be abs anti-lock.