Raleigh’s versatile Record Ace combines sensible retro styling that is equally at home on the street or at the races.
Caroline Spaeth
raleigh
record ace
www.RaleighUSA.com
Definitely Worth a Bleedin’ Nose The Raleigh Record Ace stirred in me something very old. One glimpse at the bike’s retro stylings, and I felt as if I had run into a lost friend—the kind you can’t wait to sit down with and rekindle a very long-running conversation. Turns out my last conversation with a Raleigh lugged, steel road bike had occurred about 35 years ago. I was on the cusp of adolescence when my brother went off to college and left his very cool, red Raleigh racer at home in storage. The bike was a shiny steel beauty, but I was expressly forbidden from riding her. My brother had painstakingly logged dozens of hours on the bike in preparation for a multi-day journey to a friend’s parent’s cabin located someplace in the wilds of Colorado along the Conejos 104
Price : $1,900 Weight (59 cm): 22 lbs
River far away from home. After hundreds of miles on the bike, my brother proudly announced to our family that he had finally broken in the Brooks leather saddle so it conformed perfectly to the contours of his butt. Anyone else riding the bike would ruin the luxurious fit he had created after great pains, and therefore I was never to sit upon her. Of course, that prohibition ended about an hour after my brother had left the house in pursuit of academia. My big brother’s larger-than-life Raleigh offered me something that couldn’t be found anywhere else in my formative teenage life: freedom. Even though I had perhaps a scant millimeter of standover height on the great red machine, I rode it every chance I got—so much, in fact, that when my brother eventually returned home the following summer, I got the tar beaten out of me because I had inadvertently refitted his saddle to suit my much narrower ass. At the time, I never understood why my transgression enraged