With few exceptions, road cycling shoes are all built the same way. The uppers are assembled, shaped and glued on to stiff outer plates, a semi-rigid ‘lasting board’ is bonded into the inside to cover up the rough edges, and it’s all capped with a soft insole. Pearl Izumi is doing things differently with its new Pro Leader III shoes, however, with some impressive claimed performance benefits as a result.
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Instead of going the conventional route, Pearl Izumi is wrapping the lower edges of the upper down around the bottom of the carbon fiber plate, creating more of a unified structure somewhat in the spirit of Bont’s more radical monocoque layout. Whereas the lasting board is normally used to cover up those edges inside the shoe, Pearl Izumi conceals everything with a co-molded layer of material around the outer perimeter of the carbon plate for an impressively tidy-looking finished product that reveals little at first about how the shoe is actually built.
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Instead of bonding a complete upper to the top of the outer plate, the edges are wrapped around the bottom and then covered with molded polyurethane
Such a construction method doesn’t do much in terms of weight savings – Pearl Izumi says a single size 43 shoe comes in at 235g, which is already inline with top road footwear. However, the company says that stack height comes down a significant 1.5mm, plus there’s supposedly a more direct transfer of power from foot to pedal since there’s one less layer of material in compress.
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