This one goes out to all you weight-weenies out there, we know there are a few. Courtesy of the veloptimum blog, we bring you a decidedly non-UCI legal 2.85 kg bike.
There's precious little here that's not carbon. Naturally the frame, fork, rims, handlebars, seat and so-on are made of our (well your) favourite layered, composite material. Interestingly (and I do mean this, as opposed to many people who say interestingly when it is only interesting to them) it appears even the chain-rings are carbon.
We wondered about the durability of those rings, and got us to thinking what good is a 2.85 kg bike, that costs goodness knows what but you can only get one good Olympic distance out of one? Well, the makers claim it's good for 23 000 kms, a figure we (for one) find remarkably precise!
Looking at the stock items on the frame, aficionados will see that Campy Record 10 and SRAM Red all get an outing. The pedals of choice for this weight-saving exercise were Speedplays; which is good news because an informal TZ poll shows that Speedplays are TNS's pedal of choice already! The AX-Lightness rims are commercially available, but are for tubs only, not clinchers. Which is probably good as choosing the wrong inner-tubes could significantly add to the weight of the bike! Also, the brake-calipers appear to be stock items and not custom (if a fully carbon brake-caliper can ever be considered something as mundane as "stock"). So, if you're serious about looking to shed some weight from your whip, there are a couple of small pointers here without having to go all custom on us!
We were most interested by the retro gear-levers. They gutted a set of Record 10 brifters and left them as old-school brake-levers, mounting some even more retro-looking downtube shifters to the headtube. So again, in the interests of weight, something to consider. If you're road-racing in a pack, having fingertip control over your gears is a massive advantage, and one the TA would be loathe to give up. However, if time-trailing is your thing, and you're resolutely sticking to your tried and trusted Cinelli 64-42s, then perhaps old-school might be the best school!
It's not even that an iconoclastic thing to do either. Remember; even in the days of STI/Ergo Marco Pantani famously used an old-school left-hand Record brake-lever and corresponding down-tube shifter on mountain stages, ostensibly to keep weight down and improve his climbing performance. Check out the photo below and you'll see what we mean.
In hindsight, the 60% haematocrit probably helped too. And there's the second lesson (the third, if you count "don't take performance enchacing drugs"). As cool as this would be, if your BMI is up there, perhaps it would be cheaper to watch the grams in your diet, not the grams on your bike.
Keep drooling
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