The 'An Post Chain Reaction' new team shoes; expensive but very smart

The Irish riders with An Post-ChainReaction have been getting very excited about their new shoes.

 

It’s January 1st and we all know what that means; don’t we? Yes, it’s the obligatory round of Facebook posts and Tweets from riders showing off their new jerseys and kit.

Nicolas Roche was first out of the traps last night; the dual Irish road and TT champion unveiling his new BMC Racing jersey and bike that you can have a look at by following this link.

As soon as we’d recovered from admiring the really great job BMC had done on the Irish champion’s kit, the next thing that caught our eye was the photos of new shoes being shared by the An Post-Chainreaction boys.

New signings Conor Hennebry and Matt Teggart, along with returning Sean McKenna – who is about to embark on his first full season with the team – were all raving about their new ones and twos.

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They’re by Northwave and they’re the Extreme RR model. And we think they are very tasty indeed.

Now, they’ll cost you a few quid; we’ve seen prices ranging from €315 to €365 on the interweb.

As the cable tightens the design of the shoe means it is pull equally snug around every part of the foot.

 

We’re not being paid to say this but, quite frankly, we’d probably (kinda, maybe, sort of) pay that price based on how they look alone.

They weigh an ultralight 220g and Northwave boasts a stiffness factor of 15 – which on a New Year’s Day with the guts of a full bottle of whiskey sloshing around stickybottle’s system is much stiffer than we could muster right now.

Essentially, this shoe looks great, is extremely light and it also looks fantastic.

And its stiffyness means all the power goes into getting your bicycle to move it forward as quickly as possible rather than messing around losing bits here and there.

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Northwave has included a special adaptor that makes the shoe compatible with Speedplay pedals. The company claims “the shortest distance between foot and pedal on the market”.

And it says it has achieved this by producing an adaptor with Speedplay of 0.5mm rather than the 3mm width of traditional Speedplay adaptors.

The shoe also includes X-Frame construction; a term devised to explain the way the cable that tightens it onto your foot wraps around the shoe for a very solid, comfortable and non-slip affect all over.

It’s all tightened with a ‘speed lace winch’ – or a ‘dial’ as we would call it – that Northwave says is thinner and lighter than usual and has been designed to suit the contour of the rider’s foot.

It also has an “external covering in soft touch material” – so you won’t chip your nails when readying to race/abandoning/undressing in triumph.

Northwave also says the heel has been fitted with special “gripping material” (sounds like a term we would use, to be frank) that allows the rider’s heel to slip into the shoe more easily and, once in, to stop it from moving about.

Anyway, they are bloody nice. And the An Post-Chainreaction lads are rightly excited about taking receipt of them.

 

Nothing like a new pair of ones 'n' twos

 

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