Video: Carbon wheel disintegrates during a cycling track event
Carbon fibre is an amazingly strong material, but sometimes it can fail. And when it does, it usually goes in dramatic and spectacular style such as this moment when a carbon disc wheel disintegrated during a 200m flying track sprint.
In a meeting at the Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines velodrome in Paris, Team GB’s Matthew Crampton had just started his 200m flying lap when he felt his rear disc wheel fail.
While it initially caused him to skid, the speed he was going made it impossible to stop safely, with the carbon fibre wheel separating from the rim, sending Crampton crashing to the pine. He seemed to get back up okay and tweeted that he just needed to ice his scrapes. French newspaper La Gazzette des Sports tweeted some pretty remarkable pictures of just how much the carbon Mavics were destroyed.
