You asked, we answered: Our Labs experts on wind tunnel testing, reverse mullet wheels, our ultimate Roubaix setups and more – AskCN

Start with an easy one… we do!

We have my old Trek Emonda ALR, a bike that I bought in around 2016 when I worked at a bike shop. It spent a couple of years untouched in my garage and was eventually donated to the CN Labs cause in 2024. Nowadays it lives in the office store and remains unchanged between tests so that we can use it as a 'baseline' to compare against every time we test other bikes.

Sort of.. We didn't go back to fabrics from previous years, but we did check how the performance changed as you moved from cheaper to expensive clothing.

The big caveat is that clothing is massively rider dependent, so the actual savings are to be taken with a pinch of salt, but in 2025, we got hold of an outfit at each price point from Kalas, and tested how they varied.

We had the entry-level bibs and jersey, the next tier up, a road skinsuit, a time trial skinsuit, and a double-layered super-suit designed for Olympic athletes. We also threw in some extra aero accessories too.

Both of those bikes are conversations in progress. I have an SL9 here for review, but it's not in the correct size for fair wind tunnel testing.

As for TT bikes, it's not something we've got in the pipeline for now, but it's not off the table for next year.

Skinsuits, aside from testing the difference across price points mentioned above, we've not done a skinsuit head-to-head because the results are so rider-, position-, and speed-dependent. We'd either need to do it as a bit of fun, knowing the results aren't super helpful to our readers, or do it using multiple different riders, of different genders and sizes, across a load of different speeds. That's probably more than a single day in the tunnel, which isn't a dealbreaker, but I think there are higher-priority tests that we should do first.

You won't believe me, but we planned to do this before aero mullets were cool.

Back in 2024, when we ran our second (of three so far) aero road wheel group test, we took along some Zipp 808s and 404s. We planned to test them as sold, then run some mullet / reverse mullet tests. Sadly, we ran out of time that day and haven't come back to the idea since.

I'll definitely add this idea back onto the list, though.

For some added context, the closest we've come to your setup is running different tyre widths front and rear. Interestingly, a 38mm front with 2.0 rear is 1.1% slower than a 2.0 front and 38mm rear (on 700c Hunt CGR40 wheels, tested as a bike only using an Allied Able frame). This was done in connection with our gravel tyre width test.

We tried for our gravel bike shoot out back in May. Cervélo promised a bike, but then went quiet on us, and it never showed. I think our contact at PON was juggling a few Cannondale-related things at the time, but it's definitely on the radar for the future.

The Áspero-5 is a different beast from bikes like the Crux and the Elara though, which each offer 10mm+ more tyre clearance, so that should factor into buying decisions.

I've combined these two questions because my answer to both leads down a similar path...

On the handlebar suggestion, I've steered clear so far because new bikes are invariably sold with proprietary one-piece cockpits, and so fewer and fewer new bikes are customisable in this way. However, I do appreciate that it ignores not only older frames, but the more budget end of the spectrum too.

As for the suggestion of testing a couple of older race bikes as a means to benchmark their performance in the wider standings, this is something I'm keen to try to make happen in 2027.

And to combine the answers into one thread, what could work well is taking a couple of old bikes. Focus Izalco Max, SuperSix Evo 3, Venge Vias(!?), and seeing how much we can close the gap to a modern bike. This probably won't happen very quickly, because we have a few other big projects in early 2027 to focus on (more on this soon), but it's on the list.

As for the pedals, we weigh without, as we don't know whether our readers are using Shimano, Look, Speedplay etc.

Another duo of questions combined here, as they sort of ask the same thing.

To answer the first question: in our testing, they're not. They might be faster, but with everything else kept equal, they're slower.

To answer the second: it's a simple no when querying aero alone, but complicated when you try to solve for speed.

With all else equal, a narrower 28mm setup will be more aerodynamic when both are optimised for their respective tyre widths. A bigger tyre on a bigger rim has a larger frontal area – the A in the CdA equation.

To give some data to answer this, here's a graph.

This is down to what yaw angles you're actually likely to experience when riding. Since there isn't one predominant wind direction the world over (i.e., it blows in all directions, and we travel in all directions), we can agree that the most common wind you'll face when cycling is the air that you ride through, equivalent, therefore, to the speed you travel. And since you always travel forwards on a bike, if there were no ambient wind at all, you'd experience a 0° yaw (as is common in a velodrome).

This one felt like a good question to pose to the whole team, so you'll find individualised responses below, starting with Tom Wieckowski, who rode the Roubaix Sportive in 2024.

To wrap up with a silly one... this question comes from Will Strickson, the Web Editor over at our most hated mortal enemies at Cyclist Magazine.

We all know hair is the enemy of aero, so the initial theory is that clean-shaven wins out. However, trip strips have proven effective in clothing, so would they not apply here too? Alex Dowsett once shaved trip strips into his leg hair, so in 2027, we're going to make Will Jones grow just the vertical segments of a handlebar 'tache and see whether the aero savings outweigh the friends he loses along the way.