We intentionally made all of our extensions long so they could fit anybody and they can be trimmed nearly all the way up to the bend from the back. They can only be trimmed from the front but only by about 5mm. the problem with chicane extensions is that the shifter body requires about 35mm of straight tube for insertion if you cut them too short the expander plug will bottom out on the curved portion of the bar. We mandrel mold the shifter end of the bar instead of machining (this makes the extensions a lot lighter and stronger – and more expensive) and the mandrel leaves a lip of resin inside the bar at the beginning of the bend. You can stick a small caliper feeler or scale in there to see exactly how much you can trim.

Obviously you’d expect me to say the Vuka is worth the price, but here’s why. Our purpose at Zipp is to make the highest end, no compromises stuff you can buy. If that means spec'ing a $10 swiss bearing rather than a $0.65 chinese one, then so be it, but the retail price does reflect all of the little details... the stuff is expensive because it is expensive to design and create and to make, and our average design life is 2 years before full redesign, nobody in the industry innovates as fast. Same goes with this bar. The basebar is actually made by one of the best (if not the best) frame factory in Taiwan and takes slightly more labor and cost to make than an entire carbon frame. When combined with all the other carbon parts and the aluminum parts which are all made in the USA, the manufacturing cost is equivalent to that of a very high end carbon frame/fork, so we end up selling it at a pretty low margin just to be able to sell it at all – even though we fully realize $1200 is ton money in most peoples minds to pay for “just an aerobar”. I think that those who have seen it and our other stuff in person understand that the cost is all in the details. This is the first bar that is anywhere nearly as fast as the vision but adjustable. The whole goal was to create a bar that was itself as fast as any bar on the market, but allowed great adjustability as currently all of the really adjustable bars are lacking in aero and the really aero bars are lacking in adjustability. Add to that the industrial designed hand grips, antibacterial eva foam pads, fully internal cable routing, low speed specific airfoil shapes, and about 2 dozen other features and I think people will find that this bar is offering numerous features never before seen in an aerobar plus combining all the other 'gotta have' features of other bars.

Here is a link showing how this thing works: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GVzUvuJSDP8

The quantifiable advantage over Visions is that these can be widely adjusted to make your body faster. We designed the concept after being quite frustrated in the wind tunnel with CSC finding that we were very limited to the things we could try to make those guys more aero because the bar was not at all adjustable… other than pad width there really wasn't much that could be tweaked. On the other hand, you test that bar against one that is adjustable and the difference between bars is quite large. Basically your body is about 80% of total drag and the bar is about 3%. Going to an adjustable bar has generally meant an increase in drag for the bar itself of about 50%, or a 1.5% increase to the total package, however the fitting options of having adjustability can easily net most people somewhere on the order of 5-6% reduction in total package drag (less for pros as they tend to be pretty optimized already, but often times way more for the rest of us) which more than not offsets the less aero bar choice, so the goal with this bar was to make something as aero as the Vision, but with enough adjustability to make your body fast (and comfortable) as well.

The other thing we took into account was that we measured handlebar setups at 3 IM events last year (our guys are in the transition counting bikes and wheels late at night before the race) and tallied them, finding that the average setup had a basebar angle between +5 and -3 degrees. Generally people are angling the bars to get the extensions to a comfortable position, with this bar the extensions can be angled +/-2.5 degrees with the basebar horizontal, and the bar cross section is a low speed specific airfoil section that shows almost no increase in drag at pitch angles as high as 5 degrees, where most all the currently popular bars are using rectangular or high speed specific NACA shapes that show rather dramatic increases in drag with pitch. So in the end the goal is to allow you to reduce the body drag by the 5-6% number (or even more for some people) while not adding the 1.5% increase in drag to the bar itself...

Lastly, this is the first integrated aerobar to surpass the EFBe racing+ handlebar standard (did it 4 times back to back without failure actually) as well as the DIN+ and Syntace VR3 testing standards, most aerobars are not tested to racing bar standards but only to a commuter bike type standard, and I really feel that is a big mistake, so we designed everything to pass the most stringent structural standards.

Listen to aerodynamics and Vuka design considerations: ZippCast30