Lightning In A Bottle – Bike Snob NYC

How about that debate final night time, huh? Let’s speak about it!

Simply kidding.

No, as a cantankerous previous fusspot I’ve been preoccupied with one factor and one factor solely, and that’s the discharge of the brand new Rivendell singlespeed:

[Photo: Rivendell]

Although the biking media is much extra its actual reverse, the brand new Trek Madone, which is essentially the most Madoniest Madone that Trek has ever Madoned:

How way more Madoney is it? EIGHTY FUCKING PERCENT, that’s how a lot!

So when you’re driving an previous, out of date Madone–or, heaven enable you, a motorbike that’s not a Madone in any respect–you’re little doubt feeling extraordinarily anxious proper now:

However there’s excellent news! After completely skimming the evaluation, I’ve discovered one thing mind-blowing, which is that the actual motive the brand new Madone is quicker is principally simply the water bottles:

Sure, that’s proper, simply put the brand new bottles on the previous bike and the previous bike is quicker:

And sure, the brand new bottle is UCI-legal:

It is because it handed the UCI’s notoriously stringent impression check:

Simply think about how way more precisely Cipollini might have thrown these bottles if solely he’d had entry to Trek’s cutting-edge know-how.

Anyway, you would possibly suppose Trek goes to be in hassle when Freds determine that they don’t want the brand new Madone and might get the identical impact with only a new set of water bottles. Hardly! In reality, this can be a stroke of promoting genius on their half, as a result of not solely have the found out learn how to cost $100 for a single water bottle and cage:

However they’ll most likely promote so a lot of them that even when they don’t transfer a single new Madone they’ll nonetheless come out forward. In the event you’ve ever spent any time in a motorbike store, you understand it takes hours, days, and even weeks of pandering to fickle roadies so as to get them to purchase a motorbike. Nonetheless, it takes about 9 seconds to promote a water bottle. So it wouldn’t shock me within the least if Trek has designed the brand new Madone fully as a showcase for the brand new bottle and considers any gross sales of the particular bike to be merely a bonus.

That is nice information for the buyer, too, as a result of for simply the value of a pair of Trek’s new water bottles you may as well get a whole used Trek to place them on, and it’ll most likely be simply as quick as the brand new Madone:

I ponder how briskly the Roaduno can be with the brand new Trek bottles.

I’ll need to e-book a while within the wind tunnel:

Who says you may’t get “sofa-like journey qualities” together with aerodynamics?