Clinchers are faster for time trial events. This is a fact. If you are purchasing wheels for timed events, go for clinchers.

For mass start events more and more riders use clinchers. IMHO, please don’t do it. Tires sometimes explode upon wheel contact. With clinchers you will lose control. Period. You will. I do not care so much about you. I care about the other riders that will go down with you. As simple as that. Even with a flat tubular you and clear the bunch and stop safely. Has been done before.

If you are a sprinter, you very likely will insist on having glued tires. The force transmission through the tires is spectacular. Again, if you are a sprinter, there are not many people around you. Sometimes there are incidents when a tire separates from an wheel. This does not only happen to male super sprinters, female super sprinter can do the same thing. In Keirin, there are uo to 6 other atheltes around you. Please play it safe.

Why to clincher tubes explode on the track, occasionally? If you go fast and change the line fast, the tire works a lot and gets warm and warms the rim. You can also get the tire warm while going really slow. If you go slow in the banking, there is a lot of deformation in the tire. The tire tries to roll off the rim. Warm rim and slow riding shifts the rim tape on the rim. Spoke holes get exposed, tubes goes into the spoke hole. This is what the tube generally does not survive long. If a clincher explodes underneath you on a track. I bet it will have a small semicircular hole on the inside. Alternatively the rubber will be destroyed close to the valve. Typically where the rubber changes thickness. If you see this defect, you should have pumped to higher pressure. Too much tire deformation while riding.

Countermeasures

• ride tubulars
• ride sticky rim tape. Velox is a nice one. Get the rim tape wide enough for your rim. While we are at it: shifted rim tape messes up the contact between the hook of the tire and the rim. Always nicely center the rim tape. If yours had shifted and caused a flat. Throw it away and get a new one in. They tend to move to their old position. Just repositioning them does not fix anything. I mean, its motion cause the problem in the first place. Correct?
• ride rims without spoke holes
• tubeless on the track? Well, that gets messy when the tires goes off and you will need to do a lot of cleaning.

In any case: When a tires dies on a track, investigate the reason. They should not explode or just spontaneously go flat. There is always a reason. The may be a rotten spot on the track, or somethis sharp in a crack of a concrete track. Go and look. You will find something. You however need to look at the track if the defect is on the tread of the wheel.

And yes, I get to fix more wheels that I buy myself.