Shiv road bike for 2014?

If you’ve ever visited Specialized you might have ridden their famous lunch ride – an under one-hour training ride that is balls out from the gun. Several years ago I participated in his daily ride on a Transition time trial bike. At the time I thought that with a few modifications you could turn the Transition into a road bike. Of course the UCI, with their 3:1 aerodynamic ratio rule, have other ideas about how a frame should be designed, so that would be a non-starter in the real world.

However, as I was wasting time…errr….doing some research on Facebook, I stumbled upon this concept bike that has been underneath the company’s creative director, Robert Egger. It’s the Shiv module re-purposed as a road bike and the Big S is saying it’s a one-off.

The frame itself doesn’t appear modified, but I wonder about the angles of the frame. Obviously the Shiv, and time trial bikes, are designed to be stable at high speeds with the rider in an aerodynamic position. This means the head tube angles can’t be “nervous” or “twitchy.” Perhaps this road Shiv’s head angles were altered, but I can imagine that would be an expensive proposition to make a one-off road Shiv. But, if Specialized was serious about bringing some of the Shiv’s features to the road market, it would be a worthwhile investment.

Visually the Shiv fork doesn’t seem changed, but of course that would be hard to definitively ascertain from a photo. Maybe they made a road angled fork for this project?

One feature I’m digging, that isn’t a standard option on the Shiv, is the front brake caliper wind faring. It barely misses rubbing on the front tire. Very tricky and I’m sure you gain a one-watt advantage over your competition. I’m guessing that a rock or pebble of any significant size that got caught up underneath the faring would snap it clean off – which would be a good thing.

So how would this bike ride? A couple of years ago I was part of a press junket that was launching Specialized’s 2010 product line and the Shiv was featured. I was able to take the bike for a very short roll around the parking lot of the Cliff Lodge, perched at the top of Snowbird in Utah. For what it was designed to do the Shiv was stable and fast. I’ve ridden the Transition enough times to get the same opinion – stable and fast in a time trial.

Supposing that the angles of the road Shiv’s are unmodified from the time trial Shiv I would say that the bike’s road characteristics are unchanged – it handles like a TT bike. However, in contrast to a road bike with typical road angles, it wouldn’t be as responsive cornering or making quick changes in direction. Think Cadillac versus a Ferrari.

The seat angle on the Shiv can be changed from a classic triathlon angle to a more traditional road time trial (and UCI allowed) angle. Even with those changes it still recruits a slightly different set of leg muscles – that’s why you read of pros spending significant time training on their TT bikes so they will be efficient in either a road or time trial position. I never did any significant amount of time climbing on a TT bike but I can’t imagine that the Shiv’s seat angles (which put the rider in a forward position) are conducive to an extended ascent.

Regardless, it’s cool to see these one-off projects hit the roads. And who knows, maybe some of these features will be incorporated into a road bike design.

Also, If anyone from Specialized can give me more 411 than what they posted on Facebook I’d love to hear it.

I think this bike weighed about 19 pounds?

I picked up the January issue of Bicycling Magazine the other day. When I say, “picked up” I mean purchased it electronically. As I scrolled through one article caught my attention – Badges of Distinction by Leon Dixon.

It’s a good article about the history of badges that are placed on the head tubes of bikes. As I looked at the images of the plates I saw the Viking logo. My dad rode, and I think raced, for Viking bikes back in the late 50s or early 60s. I have raced bikes since I was a teenager, employed in the bike industry most of my adult life, and I can’t recall ever seeing a Viking bike in person. So it was a nice surprise to see a badge from the British company and it got me thinking.

Today’s high-end bikes (and even low-end) are constructed from carbon fiber with a priority given to performance enhancing capabilities – lighter, stiffer, oversized for handling improvements, etc. Ascetics are, of course a consideration, as no one wants to buy an ugly bike. However, with a few exceptions, the artistic qualities of bicycle manufacturing has disappeared. Head badges from major companies, are a thing of the past. Now a logo adorns the head tube, as well as 18 other spots on the frame, to ensure that a photo taken at any angle will include the company’s name.

My first really serious road frame was a Raleigh Reynolds 531 frame. I was working at a local Schwinn bike shop and ordered it from England. I remember the frame’s color – yellow and red with the Raleigh heron logo head badge. Then, because it was lighter, I upgraded to the Raleigh Reynolds 753. The front triangle was red and the seat stays and fork was black. However, the pièce de résistance was the number holder brazed to the underside of the top tube. I think I attached a number to it just once for the Mammoth Mountain stage race. Even though the number holder was a useless appendage for me, it was a kick ass feature that made me feel pro.

Of course other bike manufactures back in the day included those elements, as well as lug work of artistic quality. Colonago comes to mind. Back in the day I took a tour of the Colonago factory in Italy and shot a bunch of photos of their bikes from down the years. Those bikes were works of art.

Unfortunately I uploaded those images to the magazine’s computer server which was the equivalent to the final scene in Indiana Jones when the Ark of the Covenant is crated up and placed in a huge warehouse, forever filed away never to be seen again.

My neon yellow Paramount

My current bikes, while ascetically pleasing and able to out-perform anything from my past, lack the soul of my earlier rigs. In addition to the Raleighs I had a neon yellow Paramount (it was the 80s and neon was the rage) when they were still being produced in the U.S. I loved that bike but I moved on from the hand brazed construction to something that was mass produced with a good sized marketing budget behind it saying this was the next best thing. Head badges, exquisite detailing of the lugs, hand painting, all tell tale signs of a bike with soul were starting to disappear.
Again, I’m not about to trade in my current carbon fiber bike and go retro, but I do miss the days when me and my buddies just rode – no power meters, heart rate monitors or computers to download information. It was a loop around Orange County with a final stop at the 7-Eleven for Big Gulps, sitting on the curb and bullshitting.

It’s that most wonderful time of the year when we head out to the malls and spend far beyond our reach. Like a lot of you, I find the choices baffling – there is so much to choose from how do you decide what to get the obsessive cyclist in your life? Thankfully I’m here to help you sort it all out with my own Browne Eye Buyers Guide. This post has gadgets that no bike rider should be without.

To point out the obvious, cyclocross doesn’t exist yet on the American television. We are forced to get our fix of ‘cross by streaming video off of a bootlegged European feed. Sometimes we’re lucky enough to get a live feed from a domestic race here and there. We’re often seen hunched over the streaming video on our small laptop monitors. However, the fine folks at Warpia have solved the problem of small screen watching forever. Slipping an adapter into the USB port of your computer and another into the your television’s VGA or HDMI port and you are now streaming wirelessly to the boob tube! You can now return to your natural position, kicked back on the couch with a beer. Your computer monitor is now free to look at flow charts, documents or whatever normal people do for jobs. I honestly have no idea.

Get the HDMI cable if you don’t already have one.

Speaking of cyclocross, this winter discipline begs to be filmed for many reasons. The racers bunched together in the opening phases of the race resemble NASCAR racing – rubbing is racing! Also there is the inevitable head over heels crash. Nothing like hitting the barriers at full gas to cause a collective “Oh shit!” With the Contour HD video camera you can chronicle all the action for later review. I mounted the HD unit to my Giro at the Cross Vegas race and recorded footage. I edited out my acrobatic skills on the bike and just posted my run-up to my beer hand-up. At that point I was way off the front or way off the back – I can’t remember. Either way the Contour HD does a fantastic job of capturing all the action. The camera turns on with a sliding switch, two red beams shoot out from the camera illuminating the area that will be recorded and you’re set. With USA Cycling striking down the possible ban on helmet mounted cameras I expect to see a lot of footage and carnage next season.

Contour also has a model with GPS!

There are moments that I enjoy quiet reflection next to a roaring fireplace reading a book and beer bonging my favorite brew. But who has the time to fight the crowds at the mall, wander through a crowded book store and then wait in line to buy your novel of choice. You need to get home and download those power files! Besides do you really want to disclose to the Barnes & Noble staff that you are purchasing the whole Twilight series? Somethings are best kept private.

The Kindle by Amazon lets you purchase and read books on the tablet’s 6” screen. The Amazon library is so expansive that any book you want is there. From the Game of Shadows to Shit My Dad Says (yeah I know – the television show of the same name is a major disappointment, but trust me the book is much better) it’s all there. It is also the perfect way to take all these books with you when you are traveling to races. Catch up on the book you are reading in your hotel or download a new book in the airport when your flight gets cancelled. Just remember to get a case or you’ll be buying replacements every few months.

Mark McClusky - tech guru and bike geek

As a long time subscriber to WIRED Magazine I have always seen senior product editor Mark McClusky’s name attached to a sports technology article. And when cycling pops up in WIRED, Mark’s name is usually in the byline. Mark isn’t just the electronics guru at WIRED, but he’s also a real bike racer with a long personal history in the sport. His roots in the sport goes back to the LeMond days with the John Tesh soundtrack interlaced over CBS’ Tour and Paris Roubaix coverage. He’s definitely not the guy who lost the bet in the office and now has to cover cycling as a result. He’s the real deal and has the collection of personal bikes to back it up. We have never crossed paths in the meat-world, but we connected through Twitter. I reached out to him to get his thoughts on cycling technology and to get the low-down on the Apple iPad.

Browne Eye: I imagine at WIRED Magazine you guys are flying around on jet-packs and having laser gun fights.
Mark McClusky: The mechanics of what we do are not any different than what most magazines do. We are not flying around on jet-packs.

Browne Eye: What!
McClusky: We are on the phone talking to writers and our sources and banging around on Microsoft Word trying to make it better. It’s not so much how we do what we do, but what we do it about.

Browne Eye: I’m disappointed. I thought for sure you guys would have the Most Dangerous Object in the Office and would be base-jumping out of the window.
McClusky: Don’t get me wrong, there is a lot of stuff here and cool things in my world. I run the product reviews and so we particularly see a lot of that here: gear and gadgets – stuff like that. But in terms of the mechanics of making the magazine aren’t particularly technological-based. However we interact with a lot of things that are hugely technologically advanced.

Browne Eye: How have you been able to sneak bikes into WIRED Magazine?

McClusky: The thing that is fun for me in my job is to talk about how technology changes the world. That is what the magazine, most broadly defined, is about. A part of that is certainly sports gear. Some sports are pretty technologically stable. In a sport like running there is an incredible amount of technology in the running shoes. But the difference between the world’s greatest running shoes and the world’s worst running shoes is not massive. That difference and technology between a department store cruiser and a 13 ½ pound ProTour bike is vast, so cycling brings a lot of technology to bear. You have the material science, the aerodynamics and the biomechanical design. There are a lot of things coalescing around one sport. And our readers are interested in cycling. As you know, there is an ongoing joke that cycling is the new golf. In some ways I think that is true. It’s a sport a lot of people have been drawn to.Browne Eye: What is your history as a bike rider.
McClusky: I was one of those kids of the first bike boom – the LeMond era. I watched the Tour on CBS in 1984 and ’85 with the John Tesh soundtrack. I was a kid who grew up in western Pennsylvania with a subscription to Winning Magazine and had the posters on the wall in my room. I totally wanted to live that life, so I started racing. I was pretty successful, but it was an incredibly small scene in the foothills of the Appalachians. There wasn’t a big cycling community back then. There might be 10 people in a junior race. I raced my first year in college and had a pretty good year, but found myself getting beaten by people I used to beat. I have gone from a high school kid with the ability to ride 200 to 250 miles a week time-wise to a college kid who was not getting anywhere near that same amount (of miles). At that age I did not handle getting beaten very well. I put the bike down. Bike riding wasn’t a recreational activity for me, it had always been a competitive activity. I put the bike down for almost 15 years. My first good racing bike was a Univega with Sun Tour components. Then I bought this midsized aluminum frame from this weird quirky company in Wisconsin called Trek, which nobody had really heard of. It was the Trek 1200 and it was between the Vitus super crazy whippy aluminum frame and the Cannondale beer can. I upgraded it over the years to Dura-Ace, but with indexed down tube shifting. Index shifting was a mind blowing experience back then. I had that bike in my basement here in San Francisco and it got stolen. I found myself really upset about it. I had ridden tens of thousands of miles on that bike. Thankfully I had good insurance on it. I stayed with Trek bicycles with and replaced it with a Trek 5500 with Dura-Ace 7800. I decided that if I had this machine I would get back into the sport and I started riding again.

Browne Eye: Have you upgraded yourself since then?
McClusky: I have upgraded and now the creative director owns that bike. Right now I own a couple of bikes. I have an Ibis SilkSL – Scot Nicol (owner of Ibis) is a good friend out here. I also own a Moots PsychloX. we did a test on cyclocross bikes and it was too good not to buy from them. I also own a couple of bikes that hearken back to my early days of racing and lusting after bikes. I have a Colnago Super with Campy Super Record. It’s an early ’80′s Super in silver and the LeMond branded steel frame built by Roland Della Santa in the immortal Z livery with C-Record including a pair of Delta brakes. I’ve never had more trouble setting up a piece of cycling equipment in my entire life, but they are so beautiful. As brakes they are more speed modulators, which is more the Campy thing anyways. Campagnolo has a different philosophy on what the brakes are meant to do. Those things are a pain in the ass right down to the 2.5 mm Allen keys that you need to get in there. Thankfully those (2.5 Allen keys) have become more prevalent recently. We also get to test and borrow bikes, so I get to rotate through bikes which is fun.

Browne Eye: Being that tech guru, what you see as the biggest technological advancement in cycling lately?
McClusky: Shimano Di2 – electronic shifting. I joked before I got on it that this was the answer to a question that nobody had. Then I rode it. Holy shit, it’s that good! It’s reminiscent of the first time you use index shifting. There was a real art in reaching down to the down tube and firing off a shift and be accurate and not messing around with the lever after you are done. So the first time using index shifting you just click and it hits and you are done. It’s, “whoa, how about that!” Electronic shifting, especially the ability to be all-out and applying as much power as you can and still be able to make a front shift smoothly and seamlessly, is pretty awesome. It’s astonishingly good, and I don’t have a bike on it yet but I am lusting after that pretty hard. It’s been interesting watching Niels Albert race on it in ‘cross races. I think it is even more applicable to cyclocross and mountain biking, which I assume we will see it on any time now. In those really difficult situations there is an even bigger benefit from it than on the road where shifting isn’t that hard to do. I also love the resurgence of carbon tubulars. I’m of the generation that you’ve raced on to Mavic GL 330 to 280s, if you were a skinny guy like me. I spent a lot of time gluing tubulars and I love the ritual of it as well as the ride. There is still nothing better and it is fun to see a new generation gluing them on. I also remember waxing my chain.

Browne Eye: Oh my god, that is a throwback to the day!
McClusky: I bet that’s one you haven’t thought about for awhile. I had a little Fry-Daddy full of wax, I’d take the chain off and drop it in. Other things I remember was Benotto Cello tape. I miss that!

Browne Eye: Speaking about things we lust over lets talk about the iPad. The iPad was announced like the Second Coming. You’ve seen it, you’ve kicked it around. What’s the lowdown?
McClusky: It’s a bit of a cop-out answer, but it is super important – clearly. As a piece of hardware I am very impressed with it. It’s beautiful and well designed. The software I am very curious to see what applications designers will do with it. I wish I had seen a little more deep thinking from Apple on the software side during the demonstration we’ve seen so far. If you think back to the first generation of the iPhone a lot of people said the same thing. I think we will see it progress and change and get more innovative.

Browne Eye: Everyone has been saying how this is going to change how we receive media from newspapers to magazines. Do you think that is the case?
McClusky: I think it is possible. We are actually thinking of using different platforms to do different things. I don’t think that the paper magazine is going anywhere, but I think if you offer people an amazing content experience on different platforms they are going to be drawn to it.

Kenda is producing tubular tires in 2010

Often pro teams are the testing grounds for new cool products. The Kenda p/b Geargrinder squad is no exception. Kenda has been producing quality clincher tires for years, however for 2010 they are stepping it up a notch. I got the heads up on the new Kenda tubular tires that will be hitting the streets in February. The claimed weight is 270 grams with a stated tpi of 300. Supple and reasonably light weight. I like…

Fast wheels from a new company - Mercury

A brand new wheel company is also debuting under the Kenda banner – Mercury wheels. Named after the fleet footed messenger to the  gods, the Mercury wheels are spinning with DT hubs laced to carbon fiber rims. Some wheel manufactures get caught up in producing a great rim, but forget about using a quality hub. It’s nice to see that Mercury is using a smooth running DT hub. Those Swiss know a thing or two about precision.

When images of the team bikes get out I’ll be sure to post them. I’ve been hearing good things…

Colnago CX 1, Shimano Dura-Ace 7900 and Kenda tires - Booyaa!

I just got a sneak peek of the built up team issue Team Type 1 Colnago CX-1. Can you say bellissima? Pearl white, outfitted with Shimano Dura-Ace 7900, PRO bar and stem and rolling on Kenda tires, this bike is going to be crossing a lot of finish lines first. I interviewed Phil Southerland, founder of Team Type 1, earlier this year and he is determined to take the squad to the Tour in 2012. If anyone can pull off such a lofty goal as that, Southerland can.