AUTUMN/WINTER 2015
CONDORCYCLES.COM LONDON SINCE 1948
The
2015 Range Overview
Winter Picks
Our pick of this season’s essential wardrobe clobber.
E T T E S S A C
Find your perfect Condor. P.3
P.4
The Interview
60 seconds with Ali Dickson, bike fitter at Condor retailer Windmill Wheels. P.7
SNEEK PEAK: Condor senior bike fitter, James, takes the new remodelled Italia RC out for a spin on the Mall, London. The Italia RC is expected to be unveiled at the Cycle Show, priced £749.99.
CREATING SPEED Writing bike reviews used to be very simple. For decades — probably most of 100 years — you could earnestly discuss stiffness, vibration damping or handling, and all the time know that the only thing anyone was going to look at was the weight of the bike. Clearly the lighter the bike, the faster it would go. It was a simple, one-stop number for cycling excellence.
The irony was that there wasn’t even much variation. In the 1900s a racing bike weighed 13kg, and by the 1950s this was down to around 10kg, where it stayed until the arrival of aluminium and carbon fibre in the 1990s. That didn’t discourage anyone. You could drop a few grams by drilling holes in any areas where you thought the bike was excessively sturdy. You could mortgage your children and buy some lightweight bottle cage bolts. When Eddy Merckx used a titanium stem for his hour record bike in 1972, riders all over the world went weak at the knees. Of course, in terms of actual speed, on a flat track the few grams saved made a difference so small it was not measurable by any normal method. Meanwhile, it was perfectly obvious that unless you were climbing, the way to really go faster was a low, tucked riding
position. Everyone knew this, but no one really tried to develop the idea. The changes started in the 1980s. In 1984, the Italian Francesco Moser broke Merckx’s hour record using disc wheels, a skinsuit and an aero helmet. All three quickly became time trial musthaves. Time trial bikes and riders began to hog the aero headlines. The technology and learning was there for the taking, though road riders continued to shy away from aerodynamics. In the mid 2000s carbon became more affordable, but the variation in quality of the ride became dramatic. Time trialists rejoiced in bicycle frames that could be made more aerodynamic. Carbon, being lighter, could be shaped into teardrops, creating fairings where using aluminium would previously have made the bike
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