An Italian Race Horse by Way of the Santa Fe Trail The feeling I experienced when I packed the Pro Estrada Team back into its hard case can only be described as reluctance. You just don’t ship a bike like this in a cardboard box. Even a hard case seems like inadequate protection. But it wasn’t fear of damage that caused me to drag my feet in returning the bike to BTI, the brand’s exclusive American distributor in Santa Fe, NM. I just didn’t want to give it back. As I pulled the straps tight around the case, I quietly tucked away fond memories of the rides we shared. There was the first ride north from Salida, with snowpack still covering the hay meadows and an icy wind streaming out of the mountains, the killer hill sprints we endured after work as the sunset over Gunnison and the mellow recovery rides we enjoyed up Ohio Creek Road. But the best memory of all, the one I won’t forget, was the 75 miles on Highway 149 traveling southwest from Gunnison, past Powderhorn and on towards Lake City. A bike like the Pro Estrada Team demands true mountain roads as testing grounds and the route up and over to Powderhorn, starting with the infamous 9-Mile Hill, was just the ticket. This ride isn’t just some back road tour. In the mid 1980s, its asphalt was graced by some of the world’s best riders who raced over its summits in the Munsingwear Classic International Bicycle Race. Back in 1986, I’m sure most of the top pro teams rode the Munsingwear Classic on Cinelli bars but they probably could 100
not have dreamed of anything like the 2008 Ram 2 bars or the Pro Estrada Team frameset. Like many modern carbon fiber road bikes out there, the Estrada Team is a race-bred machine built for performance. The combination of Italian styling and a frame of hand-wrapped, Columbus XLR8R round, oversized tubing differentiates the Pro Estrada Team frameset from the, uh, mold of more common monocoque carbon framesets. Columbus, which introduced the XLR8R carbon fiber tubeset in 2003, claims the five unidirectional and directional layers of the XLR8R tubeset gives superior damping qualities and desired strength at specific points of the frame. Cinelli was right to take advantage of the technology. Hand-wrapping a frame from a component tubeset is more labor intensive compared with pumping a monocoque frame out of a mold. To create the frame, the tubeset is bonded together using a process developed by the aerospace industry to bond and cure (co-curing) the joints in one step. The process gives Cinelli better strength-to-weight ratio, control over the ride characteristics, the ability to produce more size options and even make custom framesets for pro riders. That’s also