ing down the finishing straight towards me. Just in time I stopped the watch, deducted 2 minutes and came up with the astonishing time of 11.52 – just shy of the club record for that course. Yes, you’ve guessed it – this was new boy. Respect! Forget the bikes, the sandals, the shorts and the rest of it. Here was a star of the future. As the weeks evolved New Boy realized that he was actually quite good. He turned up a few weeks later with a rudimentary road machine, some tight shorts (much to lady club mate’s disappointment) and a club jersey. He had some nice clip-on bars, a decent pair of mountain bike shoes with SPDs and Shimano 105 all over his bike. He was on his way.
light up the whole M1 motorway, attached this stuff to the tri-bars and toddled off. With my legs astride this famed 50minute machine, the first thing I noticed was the extraordinary humming sound. The faster I rode, the louder the sound became. Near the brow of the first hill I noticed that I was now travelling at 28.37mph. Some speed when you consider the gradient, the groupset, the weight of the lights and, off course, the rider. But hang on! This may have been unchartered territory for me but this machine had re-
the frame and equipment. This led me to the next part of the test. The bike was placed on a turbo and whilst I closely inspected the flies, I had my 9-year-old pedal like fury until the speedo went to 20mph. At this point the flies started to flap their wings in unison and the humming sound started again. The faster they flapped the faster my small son pedaled until the computer was recording in excess of 40mph. So that was the answer! The reason
This rider shall remain nameless but he did go on to claim club records, win open events and generally do some astonishing times. What was interesting to me was that he did all this on a bike that was never cleaned and didn’t match up to all the fancy equipment generally seen at CTT events. This inevitably led me to the next big idea – which was to take this machine and write a review of it to submit to Scything Workly as an antidote to the endless boring bike reviews that populates its pages. By the time I could lay my hands on this hallowed machine it was near the end of the season. The first two things that struck me were the groupset and the dirt. A 50-minute man on Shimano 105? Can this be real? What would Clyking Wookly’s bike testers say about this? More to the point, does this stuff actually work? And. . . why is it that such a fast rider has the muckiest bike whilst the slowest rider in the club* always has such polished equipment? As a Campagnolo connoisseur – and Record at that – it was something of a climb down to be seen on this equipment by the usual spectating sheep, so I was forced to test this bike under the cover of darkness. The first requirement was a good set of of lights. As there are no lights within the Shimano 105 groupset, I borrowed enough kit to
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Ian Franklin - no flies on him...or his machine. cently held more than this speed over the full distance of 25 miles. This machine really flies! When I stopped at some crossroads I noticed, uncanningly, that the humming sound stopped too. This phenomena really needed to be investigated. So without delay, I got back to the layby, loaded the bike into the car and returned home. I lovingly removed the bike from the car, dismantled the 36 lights, car batteries and other floodlighting paraphernalia and took a long hard look at the machine. That was when I noticed the flies. Hundreds of ‘em. All stuck to the down tube, head tube and other bits of
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top riders travel so quickly in their weekly duets with carriageways is because of this outside assistance! Have you noticed that most time trial bikes these days appear to be black? But they are not, they are covered in flies! As for the Shimano 105 groupset, it’s good solid stuff but an upgrade to the flydeck system would make the bike go faster still. Having discovered the secret of speed, you may well wonder why I, the club’s slowest rider, didn’t utilize the same fly-by-wire system on my bike. Well, old habits die hard and after years and years of polishing . . . .
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