AeroPod, PowerPod and Newton

Last weekend I did my first Triathlon of the season (I'm in Australia).

Having used my Aeropod over the last 6 weeks to tune my bike fit, clothing and equipment choice, I was excited about seeing how aero I could be during the race. But unfortunately, the thin tube on the front of my aeropod snapped off as I placed my bike bike on the racks in the bike transition area before the race.

This created 2 problems. Firstly, I wasn't confident how accurate the Aeropod would be without the thin tube attached (so I ended up not using the Aeropod during the race and relied on my DFPM instead). Anyone have any experience or guidance on the accuracy without the tube attached?

Secondly, despite finding the broken piece of tube on the ground, I can't easily re-attach it. As you can see in the attached pictures, the threaded part of the tube is stuck inside the Aeropod body. I could perhaps simply glue the broken piece back into the hole, but then obviously it will be permanently attached to the Aeropod itself, which isn't ideal.

Of course, this is my fault for not being more careful in lifting my bike onto the racks. But in the heat of a race and wanting to do nice fast transitions, I think its unlikely that I'm going to remember to carefully lift my bike up and down from the racks.

Has anyone else had this problem? Any suggestions to address my issues? John - any ideas or thoughts?

And finally, hopefully others can learn from my experience here. I'd suggest to anyone else racing triathlons that they remove the tube before the race - it seems to me that however careful you are racking your bike, there is reasonably high likelihood of this happening again.....

You should be able to remove the screw portion of the pitot tube that is stuck inside your AP. You'll need to insert something into the interior of the tube--perhaps a thin pair of needle-nose pliers, then rotate the pliers counterclockwise to get it out.

It's too bad you did not use your AP during the race--we could have manually adjusted the file afterwards

Once you get your tube out please email tgore@velocomp.com. Tom will get you a replacement pitot tube.

Good idea, I've managed to get the broken piece out with a screwdriver.

Will email Tom as suggested to get a replacement. Thanks John.

Thanks, I am actually going to do that. I was already going to remove it for bike transport, but will reattach when loading food/drink. My experience is that it is actually other competitors that bash things. I used to have a magnet based speed sensor and someone knocked it off so my Newton+ went to sleep and I had no data for an entire Ironman cycle. I’ve switched to magnetless after. Might be a little less accurate, but at least it will work.

Once everyone has racked during last minute preparations seems most sensible to me (and hope the bikes next door don’t belong to super-fast swimmers)