El Cyclista

02.17.10

Ray Dobbin’s Paletti Cronos

I don’t know what impresses me more about Ray Dobbins. The fact that he has found and restored all of these bikes to such a high standard, or the effort he takes in documenting them. His site is well worth a visit for anyone interested in looking at the craft of frame design and how rides have evolved over the decades. It is hard to choose a favorite, but this Paletti Cronos is one of the most unique rides I have seen. Check out that paint. Man I wish I had the story behind this bike.
Photos by Ray Dobbins.

02.09.10

Austin Training Camp

Really, all this for four days, and a bike box! If the weather gods are in our favor I am off to the Endurance Werx Training Camp in Austin tomorrow. Four days of riding in the Austin hills with a little sunshine and warmth, and good company. And what a wife, who hasn’t complained once that I am off riding with a bunch of Lycra clad men in Texas on Valentines day. Now that my friends is love (the wife, not the men in Lycra). Look out for posts, pictures and interviews. It is going to be a blast.

01.31.10

Is Red, White And Blue The New Black?

In the 2007/08 season white was the new black, and before that black was the new black (well “nude” carbon was). Last season seemed to be the year of white bikes with thin diagonal pointy stripes. This year Ridley and Team Katusha are making a very bold statement with their new 2010 team bike and shifting the needle again. Big bold blocks of red and blue mixed with a little bit of white almost make this frame look retro. The change started to creep into the peleton last year when Cofidis rolled up to the Tour on a very red and white Look 595. The first time seeing it I really wasn’t sure, it looked almost plain. But looking at it again in the window of R&A here in Brooklyn, it looks like a pretty classy ride. Followed closely by FDJ and Lapierre rolling out a frame that felt more like a French national champion’s paint job than a team design, it was beautiful in its simplicity (needs a white stem, though). Also with the BMC team colors being red and black, things are looking up for a splash of red. Now all we need is a red, white and blue Pinarello for Team Sky in the Tour to make the prediction come true.

One of the most exciting things I look forward to at this time of the year is what will the teams deliver for the National Champions on their teams. BMC have killed it with George’s BMC, pure class, this is the statement of a national champion. (But ironically they completely messed it up on Cadel’s world champion frame. How could the Swiss get it so wrong? It looks so pedestrian.) Lotto and Canyon have gone for intricate and beautiful details on the insides of the stays and forks with national flags, a really lovely touch.

And you have to admire when a sponsor shows this type of confidence in one of their riders. Just today Zdenek Stybar took the world cross title and after getting cleaned up and presented with his medal as newly crowned champion, no sooner had he stepped down off the podium and Ridley presented him with what looks like a beautifully designed X-Night. Maximize that “we have the world champion time” before the cross season ends.

01.30.10

Saturday At The Pain Cave

When the temperatures hit 20 degrees and you need to break the cabin fever of the home trainer, Endurance Werx in Midtown is a fine alternative. Chad has organized a nice and intimate training environment for you to burn and hurt. We did an over-under workout today that resembled what one rider said “looked like something Chad’s daughter would have drawn for the front of the refrigerator”. Personally I thought it looked more like the New York skyline out the window. It was hot, it hurt, but it felt good.

The 2010 Tweed Run, London

“A metropolitan ride, with a bit of style“. This looks like a fun day out in your Sunday best. The second edition of the Tweed Run will take place on April the 10th at midday around the center of London. It is only 14 miles long, so need to worry about chafing from the tweed. They take a very scenic route around the city center that includes Trafalgar Square, Big Ben and Buckingham Palace, but the best bit has to be stopping for tea in the park halfway around. At the end of the ride they are throwing a party and judging who was best turned out. People into this ride make a serious effort. I think a lot of the outfits are more interesting than the bikes, with a lot of the riders sporting bespoke outfits tailored for the event. It is a paid registered ride with the proceeds going to bikes4africa.

Photos courtesy Roxy Erikson and Adam Scott

01.22.10

Is your bike male or female?

Cevelio, Eddy and Claudette. That’s what mine are called. We all have pet names for our bikes right?…. right? But how do we decide which gender they are? Mine have nearly always been male, all but one. My current ride is a Cervelo SLC, nicknamed “Cevelio“. My mental rider image of Cevelio is kind of a cross between Oscar Feriere and Francesco Moser, a little chunky, but looks fast standing still. I have no idea why this Canadian has become a Spanish male sprinter, but it just feels right. Maybe it is all that muscle up front and that big fat down tube?

I couldn’t help thinking while riding next to my friend Wai the other night that his old purple steel frame Colnago was female. Well, it is purple, and has lovely delicate little chrome lugs and some nice linear paint decoration. It kind of looks all dressed up and ready to go out. The sort of dressed up that most men don’t particularly care to do (You know “what T-shirt graphic will I wear this evening?” isn’t really dressing up right).

However my first ride was an old steel Holdsworth under the brand of Claud Butler. She (see it just feels right to say “she”) was a gorgeous royal blue and in the way that a lot of frames from the 80s look now, looked a little delicate. Hence Claudette. Despite the fact the frame is British I always thought of her as being from Belgium. Kind of like a female version of Claude Criquielion.

The side effect of this is I can’t give them up. This isn’t just a build. It is Claudette. How could I ever sell Claudette? Hence I have a bike from each period of my riding, apart from the Merckx I crumpled into the back of a car. You know this cold weather riding does funny things to your brain….

01.16.10

Stevens SLC Team

I have been staring at this frame for weeks. It has been a dark week here in Brooklyn, I am buried in work and finding it hard to get time to do anything beyond push pixels and get some -30 degree riding in. I keep coming back to this frame and admiring the design and that muscle bike front end. A brand I didn’t know much about until the Cross Season started. Nice and light at a claimed weight of 890g. But something else did bring a smile to my face. I imagine if you are a pro rider you would get very excited at that time of the year when you go to the team’s first camp and get your new kit and bikes. And then someone does this to you. What possessed someone to choose “skin tone” as a color for a kit? They will look naked! Can’t wait to see this one on TV and hopefully they will ride Roubaix, all that mud and skin they will look like mud wrestlers. Blur your eyes, go on, I dare you…….

01.05.10

The Ritte Racing Boseberg Frame

This is one seriously nice looking frame (thanks to Robot at RKP for pointing it my way). There is something very classy about that sky blue and black – very similar to the new Sky Team colors (a little weaker on the blue). Some really nice touches with the white hoods, and white and black cable covers up front. Someone really sat down and looked at every part here and considered how it could be coordinated to the frame. A few hints of Belgium, and named after the one and only climb to top it off. Check out their site for the story behind the first build.

Photos from Ritte Racing.

12.29.09

5 Team bikes that made us sit up and notice

Not the lightest bikes, or the most expensive bike of the decade, but ones that made me want to rush out and buy them. Bikes that on first sighting people talked about, but more importantly still do. Ten would have made it easy. So in no particular order, a Canadian, an American, a Swiss, a French and a Belgian (what! no Italians? and I own a Colnago….)

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1. The Cervelo Soloist SLC / Team CSC

There was a lot of buzz around the mechanics’ area on the evening of May 25th at the 2006 Giro. Cervelo had already started to make a name for themselves as a technology-forward company, and had already brought some pretty impressive prototypes to Europe, and delivered some great results on board to back them up. So when the rumors started that a new superbike, the SR71 prototype, was coming, everyone wanted a look. The new frame was a combination of the already successful R2.5 and the Soloist. The frame was introduced into the line to balance the R2.5 climber’s frame with a frame that would be lighter than the Soloist, be suitable for Classics, and roll on the flats for riders like Jens, Fabian and Stuey. It was a frame that was fundamentally different from anything that was already out there, and had more in common with its sister time trial frame than any other road frame. Rider feedback said it all – “I just ride faster on it.” (Note: Those are the legs of Kurt Asle Arvesen on the Champs-Élysées at the end of a 3-week Tour, as he asked me if I wanted him to smile for the camera – “more interested in your legs Kurt.”)

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2. The Cannondale CAAD7 Prototype / Team Saeco Cannondale

When Simoni was on top of his game he got to demand whatever he wanted. Back in the days when the UCI were still playing around with the idea of weight limits, Simoni demanded the lightest frame he could have to tackle the 2003 Giro. Aluminum was still the choix du jour and Cannondale’s Optimo tubing was the best you could get. They built him up a small frame using their new proprietary Alcoa aluminum tubing with oversized diameters for strength, and it was finished off with no paint or clear coat. The bike he rode in the 2003 Giro would eventually become the CAAD 7 Optimo road frame. Also notice the Fizik saddle (which they kept a cover over for most of the tour), the first time that saddle was seen, and the SI Hollowgram cranks (with a 38 X 28 ratio to get over the Zoncolan). There was a lot of goodness on this bike that is still around today.

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3. The BMC Pro Machine SLC01 / Team Phonak and BMC

It has to be said, in pictures this frame never really did it for me, but man when you see this thing in the flesh you really start to appreciate the design and engineering that went into it. The tubing shapes, skeleton rear end and the angles make it feel architectural. It was the first bike I saw with a completely flat top tube and tubes that flipped shape and dimensions as they ran down the length of the bike. The only thing that isn’t carbon on the frame is the bottom bracket casing. Coupled with beautiful and minimal Swiss graphics and a paint design that perfectly picks out the lines of the frame, this is a bike to remember. The other nice touch was the mix between matte and gloss finishes, with the gloss only being added to the paint areas, making the white on the front end and bottom bracket area really shine. One thing that I would rather forget is the wonderful tagline found in the Swiss edition of their 2009 product catalogue: “It is 100% seduction, where the high pulse is yours for free“, indeed.

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4. The Look 595 / Team Crédit Agricole

Not the first white bike we ever saw, but the one that triggered the current trend. Just when everything was getting to the point of, “no paint please, it is carbon and I must show it to the world”, Look covered the whole frame in white paint. Lovely. Not only that, they dispensed with the seat post as well, and decided to make it part of the frame, something they had been doing on their track frames for awhile. Look claims that it was the first frame to use Nano Tube technology, and this coupled with them being experts in lugged construction made this if not one of the lightest frames (just over 1000 grams uncut, but then you don’t need a seatpost), certainly one of the most solid. Also at a time when tubing was getting larger and more shaped, they kept the design refreshingly simple with a slightly elliptical top tube and boxed seat tube, producing a bike that looks pretty timeless and sophisticated. There is a rumor that Thor refused to give his up when he moved to Cervelo, and has a couple in his garage. That I can believe.

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5. The Eddy Merckx Team SC / Team Lotto and Domo Frites

The only frame that Bicycling magazine ever gave a perfect score. A phenomenal all-around race frame with wins in the cobbled classics with Johan Museeuw and Van Petegam on board, to mountaintop finishes in the Alps with Richard Virenque. The design leaves a lot of clearance up front for the different tire and rim options for the classics, and a longer top tube (by 1cm) than the seat tube makes handling on the “rough” surfaces of Northern Europe a lot easier. I have seen a build of this frame with Campy record and Zipp 202 wheels that came in at 6KG/13.2lbs, which is light enough for anyone (although some of the carbon parts would probably not survive a racing season). This frame is now in the realm of being collectible.

12.19.09

Rivette Bikes of Denmark

Walking around in Vevey, Switzerland, I saw a rider coming down the street in 23-degree temperatures, so I naturally thought, “serious.” He was riding a brand I had never seen before called Rivette. The company is based in Denmark and do all of the frame and paint work in-house. They seem to be better known for their MTB frames, but make this gorgeous aluminum frame, the R6 (which this guy was riding). The frame is coupled with their own R6 monocoque fork and Rivette headset. For an aluminum frame it isn’t cheap at 1598eu (about $2278), but there is a lot of craftsmanship and a really nice paint job for the price. Their name is inspired by one my favorite cycling terms, “on the rivet” (in my case going as fast as I can, without pulling a Pluto face), and I love their comment, “if you only want a bike to park in front of the coffee shop, buy an Italian frame.” Cheeky.

Photos by Rivette Bikes