AERO GAINS FOR EVERY BUDGET

Inflation's down, meaning you can spend, spend, spend on multisport gear. Okay let's not get carried away but, as you'll discover, whatever your spending power, there's significant time to be saved with a selection of judicious buys...

It’s simple: if you can present a lower profile, via gear and positional tweaks, you will record a faster bike leg. And that’s whether you’re a newcomer who’s just starting off on their sprint-distance journey or an Ironman old hack who’s been racing for 20 years. Either way, becoming more aerodynamic on the bike can not only save you time on two wheels, it can save you energy for the run, too. That’s why we recommend you remortgage your house and buy every ounce of slipstreaming speed you can…

What’s that? You’re not willing to remortgage your abode in search of a massive reduction in drag? Okay then, we’ll be realistic and chart the wind-beating gains you can make for three separate budgets: sub£2,000, sub-£5000 and, for those of you who don’t work in publishing (aha), sub-£10,000.

At each level, we’ve identified where you can maximise your budget, though we’re also assuming you’ll potentially carry over some gains from one price point to the other, like leg shaving, so we’ve carried over these time savings to the next price point. Inevitably there’ll be gaps and disputes, but we see this as a pretty comprehensive assessment of where best to spend your cash. Right, onto helping you buy a fair few watts savings for this race season (note: time savings are over 40km compared to a ‘draggy’ set-up)…

ROAD BIKE

If you play your fiscal cards right, you can spend up to 75% of your two-grand budget on your bike and the remainder on aero accoutrements. At that price you can bag yourself a full carbon bike, which naturally tends to be moulded with aero tubing, albeit we’re going for road rather than a full-on tri effort as we’re presuming this is your one and only bike. They’re also lighter than aluminum and steel models. That’s not aero talk albeit steel bikes are constructed with round steel tubing, so not as drag-reducing as other materials.