In 1998, Campagnolo unleashed its new
"Pro-Fit" pedals on the cycling world. In this
edition of Tech Talk, we offer two points of view:
For an illustration (borrowed from the official
Campagnolo website), click
here.
By Tim Laflin
Campy's newest offering and the Competition
Not even a year ago I was speaking to the technical
department at Campagnolo USA and giving them a list of
stuff they should quit making. The pedals were on the top
of that list. Now it is my turn to eat crow. Campy used
to take a 10 year old look design pedal and sell it for a
ridiculous amount of money. Nobody in their right mind
would spend the money for them. They were expensive and
heavy. That has all changed. The 1998 pedals are totally
new. It appears that Look may have had some influence in
the design, but the pedals look nothing like anything out
there. The next big question is what are they and what
are they not?
The Cleat:
I appears that there is some Look influence in the cleat
design for the shoe. The standard Look cleat is gone, but
the shoe interface is the same. The three screw with
sliding track is kept, so you will most likely be able to
use them on any shoe known to man (except SPD-only type
shoes). The cleat is wide like the older Look cleat to
give good shoe support. If you do not ride a completely
rigid shoe the flex in the ball of the foot will not make
a hot spot on those long rides. The more flexible the
shoe you ride, the more important the cleat width is.
Some riders complain that the SPD (one of the smallest
cleats) makes the ball of the foot hurt after several
hours.
The Pedal Features:
Campy has addressed so many issues in older pedals that
you have to really take a step back and wonder why nobody
else tried it first.
Unweighted disengagement:
The new pedal body has a two smallish ramps that make the
pedal increasingly harder to disengage with force
applied. This means that the more pressure you are
placing on the pedal the harder you will need to twist to
make the cleat disengage. Why do I care? I have been in
more than one crit sprint when somebody is rocking the
bike hard and steps out of an older Look pedal or an SPD.
The danger in most pedals is that there is very little
feed-back to the rider at the point of disengagement.
Time pedals give a progressive resistance until release
which is better than most. The problem with Time is that
the force required to get in and out of the pedal is
usually more than the casual or light weight rider likes.
The other problem that Time suffers is the constant
return force that keeps centering your foot to the pedal.
I would not say the Time pedal is free-floating like a
red Look cleat. Campy fixed this with the ramps on the
cleat base of the pedal. To disengage the pedal the cleat
must twist and move up the post ramps at the same time to
release. What this does for the rider is to make it
increasingly more difficult to twist the cleat to get out
as more pressure is applied to the pedal. Will I get
stuck in the pedal? No, with a small amount of downward
pressure on the pedal you will still pop right out. The
point is, when you have enough weight on the pedal that
you do not want to come out even if you twist hard enough
to disengage most pedals, you will not come out. If the
pedal did let you out at that point, you most likely
would be singing a few octave above your normal self
while straddling the top tube at 35mph. This is something
that no other pedal on the market offers.
Adjustable Release Tension:
This is a big one! Why is it that the cleat retention and
engagement springs are tied together on all the other
pedals? If I want the holding power of a bench vise I
need to get my wife to back over my foot with the car to
get the cleat into the pedal. I usually have to jump up
and down on the pedal to get in. Conversely, if I want
and easy entry, I also get an easy exit. I hate it when
that happens. Campy has split the springs: the entry
spring is set apart from the exit spring with different
springs working the vertical engagement and the
horizontal disengagement. This means you can give your
wife a set for Christmas and she will be able to step
into them without your help. I made the mistake of giving
my wife a set of Time pedals that she couldn't engage,
because she did not weigh enough to push the cleat into
the pedal. The other point is that you can now exit at
what ever level of pressure you want and still keep the
easy entry. You most likely will not need to crank this
up like your old pedals due to the post ramps that
prevent accidental disengagement.
Shoe Sole to Axle Center:
What? The distance the pedal body and cleat move your
foot above the center of the axle. This has been kept to
a minimum. At 10mm it is comparable to the benchmark of
Time. The Time pedal is still the winner in this category
at 9.5mm followed closely by Bebop at 11mm and then the
rest of the low stack pedals and cleats. Most of the
newer pedals have a decent number. There are a few
exceptions, but be careful that the advertiser gives not
only the rise from the center of pedal axle to the top of
the pedal body, but also the amount of rise on the cleat.
There are a lot of cleats out there that move the shoe up
quite a bit. Look style cleats move up the shoe sole
quite a bit. Campy has not kept the cleat rise to a
minimum and this is an area of improvement they need to
look at . By the same token the rise in the sole of a
Time shoe is not small either. A Sidi road shoe with Time
adapter on has less rise than the time shoe. A
manufacturer will quote the best number only! Most SPD
style cleats and pedals are worse than the more road
specific competitors. Do I really care how much rise is
in the pedal system? It is a big deal in feel of the bike
while standing and during hard efforts. As you pedal, any
energy that is not directed exactly vertical to the pedal
axle is magnified by the distance your effort is applied
above the axle center. It is a basic force times lever
arm dilemma. You waste energy compensating for this sort
of rolling off the pedal effect to keep your shoe
stationary. This magnification also comes back to you in
a less smooth pedal stroke and a decreased coupling feel
of your foot to the pedal. The result is a bike that may
feel less solid under your feet. Any rider can benefit
from this improvement, but the better your technique the
less effect this distance has. The bottom line here is
you need to add up all the numbers and not just the
number for the pedal. This will vary with shoes and
cleats so if this is something you want to pursue choose
wisely.
What am I paying for?
The pedals come in three levels. Record, Chorus and
Athena. The rest of the gruppos get the Athena level
pedal (Avanti and Mirage). As expected the Record pedals
are the lightest and get sealed bearings (3 per pedal)
and a Titanium axle with aluminum retainer. The triple
bearing setup here helps minimize flex in the Ti axle.
The Chorus is almost identical, but heavier than the
Record because of a steel axle and retainer. The Chorus
uses a cup and cone style ball bearing setup instead of
sealed bearings. It physically looks very similar to the
Record. The Athena uses a steel axle, but gets 2 sealed
bearings per pedal instead of the more costly cup and
cone setup that Chorus gets. The Athena also gets a
cheaper plastic axle retainer that requires a special
tool that Record and Chorus do not need, because the
designers saw fit to use a standard hex bolt style
retainer. This Athena retainer is very Shimano-like
design like the old 737 off road pedals. Shame on Campy.
I have not had a chance to disassemble the pedals as of
yet, but you should find that in true Campy philosophy
the bearings are easy to service. It can think of several
examples like Look and Time pedals that are basically
impossible to replace the inner axle bearings on. Campy
now has a good offering to the market that is long over
due. Shimano is a step behind this one.
Illustration source: www.campagnolo.com
Our Road Test
June '99 update!
Is the cycling world ready for yet another style of
clipless pedal? Look exploded onto the scene in the early
80s, freeing riders from the cleat-and-strap system that
had fastened shoes to pedals since the turn of the
century and making riding both safer and more
comfortable. Then came Time, followed by ShimaNO and its
SPD system. Others, including Speedplay, round out the
selection now available.
So along comes Campagnolo, which is scheduled--at long
last--to start shipping its Pro-Fit pedals to a
distributors in October '98. How will they be received?
To try to answer that question, we asked the boys in
Vicenza to ship us a pari--which they did, arriving in
mid-September (they were most certainly the first on our
block!).
A few initial observations:
- The pedals are certainly different from anything
else out there. As Tim points out above, the
cleating mechanism is unlike anything else on the
market--sort of a hybrid of Time and Look. The
pedals are fairly small, but have a wide area on
which the cleat sits.
- In terms of weight, the pedals are very light.
They're somewhat heavier than the Speedplay
Titanium pedals they replaced on my personal
bike, but then just about anything would be.
They're much lighter than even the lightest Look
or Time pedals.
- The cleat, at first glance, looks exactly like a
Look model--the overall shape is the same, and
they mount to a standard 3-hole Look pattern
(unlike ShimaNO's latest pedal, which requires a
special bolt pattern only they offer). However,
the cleat is actually a two-piece design: a
small, metal cleat piece (much like the rear
cleat in the Time design) nestles inside the
outer plastic Look-shaped cleat. The metal
portion of the cleat features bevelled edges to
make cleating in easier, and a rubber insert to
reduce metal-to-metal contact on the pedal and
cut down on vibration.
- The Record pedals feature a painted finish.
That's too bad, considering the fact that no
matter how hard you try, you're going to step on
the bottom of the pedal once in a while, and the
paint is going to get scratched. Sure, most
pedals on the market today are painted, but it
would have been nice to put a polished finish on
Campy's flagship model. The rear end of the pedal
is a black plastic cover which contains a tiny
clear window through which the cleat tension
indicator can be seen. Unlike a Look pedal, the
back of the Pro-Fits doesn't move.
- Projecting from the pedal just aft of center is a
"U"-shaped metal bar, which latches
onto the metal cleat insert to hold everything
together. One rider who saw the pedals predicted
that this rather small contact point looks like
it will be subject to high wear and tear, and in
fact Campagnolo's current small parts catalog
shows it as a replaceable item.
My first impressions after riding the pedals:
- Overall, this is a very nice design. According to
Campagnolo, the pedals have a split cleat
in/cleat out tension system, which uses a single,
low spring tension for cleating in and an
adjustable tension for uncleating. The pedals
come with the uncleating tension set at the
lowest level, and based on my experience, that's
all you'll need. Unless you're a very rough
rider, it's going to be tough to accidentially
uncleat from these guys. When I set the tension
at about 1/3 of max (there's a little window at
the back to show where you're at), I found it
annoyingly hard to get out. Maybe I'm spoiled by
my Speedplays, which are very easy to cleat in
and out of--longtime Look users might like the
tension adjustment more than I do.
- Once cleated in, the pedals provide a very firm
connection between show and pedal. I can't detect
any type of up-down play at all, and the fairly
wide contact area provides a vary stable platform
to ride on. In this area, the Pro-Fits exceed the
performance of Speedplay, which has a smaller
contact area and is more prone to side-to-side
rocking.
- The distance between the cleat and the top of the
pedal spindle is relatively small, although
Speedplay again has the advantage with a very low
shoe-to-spindle measurement. I ride with Sidi
Genius shoes, to which I needed to add an adaptor
plate to use the Pro-Fit cleat; overall, I needed
to raise my seat 1/4-inch to make up for the
additional hardware in the shoes.
- The much-vaunted "float" in the pedals
(about 14 degrees) is the minimum I would
consider acceptable. On the plus side, the pedals
do not attempt to recenter; on the minus side,
the float is less than half that of Speedplays.
- One long-term test result
is a confirmation of reports we've received from
other riders about the Pro-Fit cleats: They wear
out very quickly. We're about five months into
our road test, and the cleat on the shoe we
uncleat when stopping is almost worn out at the
front. That's unacceptably quick wear, as far as
we're concerned, and it's clear that Campy needs
to improve the material they use in the cleats.
(Replacement cleats are relatively cheap--about
$18--but they should still last longer than they
now do.)
So, are the Record Pro-Fits worth the $200+ they will
fetch when your local bike shop carries them? Tough to
say. They're certainly a nice design--watch this space
for more long-term testing!
June '99:
We're about eight months into our road test, so here are
a few more observations:
- Campagnolo must do something
about those cleats. Our
"uncleating-side" cleat (the one that
touches down at stops) lasts about 2,000 miles
before it needs to be replaced. Replacement
cleats are available, but they should last
longer. Campagnolo, are you listening?
- The mechanisms are still working perfectly. Not a
single glitch, although we still miss the easy
in-and-out of our old Speedplay pedals.
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