On Bicycles, and.... what else is there?

First I saw it on the UCI list of approved frames for June , then I saw a teaser video posted to the Trek website , and then this uncredited photo was posted to the Weight Weenies forum: My that looks fast. Maybe it's the color, but it reminds me of the Canyon Aerooad. The Canyon has done rather well in the tunnel, not in the class of the Cervélo S5, but fairly good. See for example Tour magazine data here . So I expect the Trek will be at least this good. But then there's weight. The Madone 7 was quite light with the vapor coat -- under 800 grams. But then the Emonda came out, pushing that lower, but there's only so far you can go below that. So the Madone was a bike of compromise. Now they want you to buy two bikes: the lightweight Emonda and the "aero" Madone. So the pressure's off on weight. But I wonder how they did. Nothing on this one looks particularly heavy. From what I see I really like it. The days of bad-riding aero frames are over...

GT has come out with a really cool new bike, the Grade Carbon, which is designed to the "all-road" model for bikes able to handle paved roads, dirt, gravel, and trails. That starts with a bike designed with tire clearance first (35 mm), then with a frame design with compliance as a first priority. So GT builds into the frame exceptionally flexible seat stays to provide suspension for the rear wheel. It also has swept out handlebars, which I'm tempted to call novel. Tire clearance in the rear means long chainstays, and the Grade Carbon has by today's standards exceptionally long ones, at 430 mm. It also has a really slack head tube. One issue with "endurance" bikes is always geometry. Numbers are here: Here's a comparison of the GT Grade to the Trek geometries: The GT Grade is very close to the Domane 6, which is considerably more relaxed than the H2 (it's sort of an extrapolated H3). By the way, those diagonal lines show the effect of 1 ...

BikeRadar announced that Trek is releasing an aluminum version of their Emonda frame. The frame is listed as 1050 grams unpainted. This is curiously less than the Emonda S series carbon fiber frame, and comparable even to the Emonda SL frame. Here's a blog post where an Emonda SL was weighed at 1040 grams . So only the Emonda SLR is substantially lighter. Adding paint the the Emonda ALA aluminum model would likely increase it to closer to the Emonda S, but brushed Al frames look pretty good. Trek Emonda Al Criterium racers get excited over Al frames because they can be made very stiff and yet there's less concern about crashing them than expensive carbon fiber. And with a bike like the Trek coming in within a pound of the lightest commercially available carbon fiber frames, the weight difference on anything other than extended climbs is almost trivial. Indeed the Cannondale CAAD-10 has such a dedicated following that Cannondale sells it with near-top-end components...

Upon returning from a trip from KAUST in Saudi Arabia last week I connected through Frankfurt Airport. I was a bit grumpy because security had just confiscated my package of delicious Jeddah figs claiming they were a liquid hazard. It wasn't just that I was to be denied of the chance to share what I'd been finding so delicious during my 6 days at KAUST, but just as equally it seemed wrong for such fantastic fruit to go to waste, all over a ridiculous policy bourne of international paranoia. But my mood was slightly lifted when I spotted in a newsstand across from my gate the golden apple of German journalism: Tour Magazine. Depite a painfully long and even more painfully slow line at the stand, I risked being late to my boarding to buy it. And I wasn't disappointed. Edition 2015.03 of Tour had a quantitative review of 3 of the lightest frames you can buy: Trek Emonda: The Trek Emonda line is actually relatively heavy. Only the top-of-the-line SLX with the pricey vap...

So far I've been sticking mostly with main-stream bike brands with the exception of Swift. This time I'm focusing on premium frames, including the stock geometries from custom framebuilders. For reference, I include the Trek Emonda, which is obviously both light and expensive in the SLR with vapor coat model. Then I include the Cervelo RCa, the same geometry as the Cervelo R5, which is the most expensive frame here, at over $10k with the crankset, but it's also (except for geometry) perhaps the best all-around bike ever designed (the white paper is fantastic). Then I include two exotics: the AX-Lightness Vial Evo, extremely rare so far, and the Lightweight frame, which needs to be included by virtue of its name but which actually isn't that light when compared to the Cervelo and Trek. Then there's the Guru Photon, which made a bit splash when it was announced at Interbike around 5 years ago, but for which the low weight shown there was a very small frame built...

I previously showed the Canyon Aeroroad. But Canyon's perhaps more popular bike is the Ultimate, a perennial competitor for Tour Magazine's lab-dominated bike of the year ratings. A prime competitor is Storck, a more niche German company known for its engineering-based approach to bike design. Included in that approach is a relatively unique approach to geometry. Here's a comparison of Trek, Specialized, Canyon, and Storck road bikes, where I've left off the endurance bikes this time: Canyon is clearly sticking to the stack-reach design philosophy with both of its models. And for once a bike company does the obvious which is to make the aero bike lower. And the longest Ultimate is incredibly long. It must be those tall Norwegian customers. But the Storck 0.6 is a bit bizarre. The smallest size differs only in stem length, essentially (actually with the head tube angle being slacker than 73 deg, slammed stem will result in the smallest being slightly higher). Th...

Last time I compared Trek to Cervelo for stack-reach. The Madone H1 and the even more aggressive Domane Race were much longer/lower than the Cervelo H1, and even lower than the more race-geometry Cervelo R-series from 2008. The Madone H2 and Cervelo R5 were comparable. The Trek Domane 6 was substantially more relaxed than the Madone H2. It's really designed more as a century bike than a race bike, although it may provide a good fit for some racers. Here I compare the Specialized line to the Trek line. I already looked at the 2015 Tarmac. In the following plot, I add in the Roubaix endurance bike as well as the Venge aero road bike: The Venge is basically identical to the Tarmac. The Roubaix is fairly close to the Trek Madone H2, not nearly as relaxed as the Roubaix: around 2.5 cm spacer difference. The Madone H1 is more aggressive than the Tarmac, however: with two lines of Madone they can afford to be more aggressive on the longer/lower version. This suggests for racing...

Previously I plotted the Trek Madone stack-reach. Consistent with using "race bikes" from other manufacturers, I used the more aggressive of the two geometries, the H1. The H1 used to be called the "pro" geometry, in contrast to the more relaxed "performance" geometry, but Trek decided, apparently, that this implied the more relaxed geometry was a lower standard, compelling weekend warriors to buy bikes which didn't fit them well. So the "pro" became H1, and the "Performance" became H2. In addition to the Madone, the Domane is also a legitimate race bike, sold for comfort at some cost in mass. The standard Domane, as is the standard with "endurance" bikes, has relatively relaxed stack. To compel professional riders, most notably Fabian Cancellara, to ride the frame a lower-stack model needed to be developed. Since the UCI requires bikes given to professional riders be made available to the public, Trek made availabl...

More stack-reach comparisons, retaining the tall (Cervelo R5) and long (Trek Madone H1) winners from last time: First, there's a new obvious "tall" winner, and that's the Parlee Z5 tall model. Of course this isn't a fair comparison, as it would make more sense to compare the Parlee tall geometry to the endurance geometries of other bikes, but I put this here for comparison since I recently test-rode a Parlee ESX. The regular Parlee Z5 geometry corresponds to around 2.5 cm less spacer height, and has more traditional road racing geometry (clearly not designed to a stack-reach spec, however, since the curve zig-zags). Specialized is interesting, as the smallest 3 models are essentially constant reach, changing only in stack. This is because top tube length is directly canceled by seat tube angle. This keeps the reach the same as the top tube is lengthened. The bikes still fit bigger riders, however: adding spacers to the smaller frames would bring them to a...

More bikes added to the stack-reach plot I showed last time. It's tempting to add more and more but I run out of colors, and humans have only 3 color receptors so there's contrast only between so many... Again the mostly vertical blue lines indicate points which can be matched to fit with the same stem but with more spacers on the lower stack, longer reach frame. Spacers reduce reach and increase stack. I additionally added mostly horizontal blue lines, which are spaced by 1 cm spacer height apart, again assuming a 73 degree head tube. These lines would correspond to points which you could reach with the same spacer height, but different length of 0 degree stem. Of course stems aren't typically 0 degrees 6 degrees, 10 degrees, and 17 degrees are popular, and these can be flipped positive or negative. But the spacing between these lines is the key point. For small riders, Cervelo and Swift rule, Swift providing less stack, the Cervelo geometry at this size only rela...

Well, since I got an eye infection around a month ago, I've been feeling up and down, but mostly down. Progress after antibacterial drops from the optometrist , but since then, I've been feeling under the weather again. I needed to pass on the University Road Race, which is a favorite race of mine. My power numbers suggested I should be able to hang on that suffer-fest, and placing at University probably means a top-15 result, which is good for me. So when I'm not riding, my mind invariably drifts to equipment. This bike in particular catches my attention: Trek District Carbon First, the rational self: this thing makes no sense at all. Urban bikes get ridden through potholes, leaned against posts, stacked on bike racks in overcrowded Caltrain cars , wrapped with chains outside Rainbow grocery , and shouldn't stand out in a crowd of possible theft targets. This bit of bike boutiquery begs to be babied: one serious scratch or crack on carbon and it needs to be toss...