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FEATURES: 2008 LONDON BIKE SHOW – SOMETHING NEW
Austin Curwen
October 24, 2008
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In addition to the cool old-school stuff I highlighted last time, there was also the obligatory acres of carbon fiber, titanium, and the fast light gear. To lead off, one trend I have noticed creeping into the cycling world is the compact handlebars. I personally trace these back to Modolo’s Curvissimo bars, which, incidentally are fabulous, and as rare as hen’s teeth.
Apparently everyone else is catching on. FSA had several examples of their compact bars in both carbon and alloy.
And the latest entry into the world of compact bars is Zipp with their own stylish version. Just as an aside, for those of you who have never been to one of these shows, theme booths are usually a bit silly, but Zipp’s booth festooned with their “speed weaponry” logos, backed up by gleaming and very aero gear was pretty cool.
My last blog mentioned Sunrace’s 10 speed gruppo. Haven taken a good look around their booth, I think we will be seeing more of this company. They have put together a range of Shimano compatible, riding groups. These range from the race level Driven RZ (10x2) to serious amateur/ rec level RX and RS groups. Each has their own brake-shifters, a range of racing or compact cranksets, and the RZ and RX are sporting some interesting hollow pin chains.
Another thing that caught my eye was at the Mavic booth. I have a set of Mavics I have ridden for years, they are bomb-proof, and as a company I hold them in high regard. Looking through their endless racks of wheels, and gazing past the endless rows of uber-light race hoops, I spied a wheelset I had never heard of before–The Eclipse. These are Mavic’s track training wheelset. According to the rep, they have been around for six or seven years, and one would see these regularly in a track training session. Questioning him further, I thought that they looked like pretty strong rims that might do double duty on the road for a fixed gear rider. The rep agreed, and apparently sales for exactly that have been growing in the last year or two.
And now, some of the cool bikes I saw. The winner of the strange but cool prototype bike award goes to Cannondale with their Stealth Concept bike. This seems to be a racy urban flat-bar mount. In all it was fun to look at and muse, and while I don’t completely get their whole one-legged fork concept, the whole thing works.
From the ‘it’s too bad these will never be imported to the states’ files, there were two companies that caught my eye. The first was Ridgeback. This is a long standing British company whose focus is the UK with some sales in Europe. They have an extensive range of bikes from sleek racing mounts to sturdy town bikes. They are well thought of over here, and the bike that caught my eye for it’s functional simplicity was their new single-speed (complete with mud guards!).
The second company was Austrian based KTM. Since 1964, they have been doing all of their design and fabrication (down to the paint) in Mattighofen. They seemed to have a big presence in the mountain bike world, and their in-house marketing guy was well aware of RBA’s sibling magazine Mountain Bike Action. I on the other hand, was smitten by their road bikes. Their top end road bikes were the Revelator Prestige with frames weighing in at 950-grams (50 of those were the paint according to their tech guy). While there is no shortage of carbon race bikes in the US, these would be a welcome addition to our shores.
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