As I mentioned recently, there’s a notion in the cycling world that a bike is an instant classic simply because it’s made out of steel, and now here comes Colnago taking this idea to the extreme with a 3D-printed magnetic bicycle:
I’ve read the specifications three or four times now, and still the only thing I understand is that it costs 17,500 European Fun Tickets:
Not that I’m indignant or anything. Colnago have always made lavish and exotic concept and limited edition bikes:
[Photo from here.]
Though it’s ironic that the style of Ernesto Colnago’s bikes has always been informed by speed and an unerring sense of cool, whereas his own personal style owes pretty much everything to Earl Camembert:
Also, to their credit, Colnago does keep their heritage alive by continuing to offer the Master–which for a steel bike was also pretty edgy when it was new what with its star-shaped tube profiles and stuff:
I have never ridden a steel Colnago, though I have ridden a titanium one:
It was the Bititan, renowned for its split-crotch downtube:
As Colnago tells it, the idea behind the Bititan’s downtube was that it simultaneously stiffened the bike while keeping the weight down. It’s hard to imagine any sort of downtube allowing for any noticeable amount of flex, though I do recall the bike feeling pretty stiff, so who knows? What I can say for sure is that it looks cool, and also that when it rains you take a lot of road spray, which is a quirk it shares with the Y-Foil. In fact, if you grafted the front end of a Colnago Bititan to the rear end of a Y-Foil you’d have the most rider-moisteningest bicycle ever in velocipedal history:
And yes, proving once again there’s no idea in cycling that doesn’t come back eventually, Factor Bikes offers a split downtube–or at least they did until a few years ago:
Sadly, you’ll probably never see a split downtube on a gravel bike, since not only would you be pelted with very small rocks…
…but you’d also have no place to stow all your groveling graveling accessories:
What you’re looking at there is the glove compartment on the new Mondraker Arid Carbon:
You’ve got to feel for companies like Moonraker, who in this overheated gravel market are just fighting for scraps. For one thing, all the good desert-themed model names were taken, so they had to settle for “Arid,” which does nothing to inspire excitement and just gives you dry mouth. All the bullshit proprietary bike-building process names have also been taken, so Mandrake have had to settle for “Stealth Carbon,” which means that “each tube is optimized to do a specific job:”
Genius! No other bike has ever used tubes to do a specific job before. That’s why you’ll often see frames with tubes that just stick out randomly in all directions, attached to nothing, rolling around in the desert like porcupines.
Too bad Trek beat them to it by a good 30 or so years with their revolutionary “Function Specific Design,” still the best meaningless proprietary design term ever created:
Then Cannondale countered with The Power Pyramid, which was the exact opposite of the split downtube, while ostensibly yielding the same result:
Though it always seemed weird to call a tube a pyramid. How can something round be a pyramid? It was really much more of a cotton candy cone:
But yes, certainly the ’90s and the early aughts were the golden age of making up important-sounding names for mundane parts of the frame. Consider the Look 566, which I reviewed way back in 2009:
It had F2D up front, and STSC out back!
Twisted concept indeed.
I think it’s about time Rivendell got in on the act and started labeling their bikes with all sorts of proprietary terminology. “Lugs?” That just sounds heavy and ponderous. Why not call them “Anti-Torsional Tube Receptacles?”
Now that’s exciting!