New Team GB bike
 

I wonder when the UCI will limit width of frame.

This is interesting, putting the stays and fork blades far away from the wheel. I wonder if there's a drafting effect on the seat stay from the rider's legs. The stays could even clean up the air coming off the rider's legs.

Picture from article:
https://www.britishcycling.org.uk/92...ke/JC-8700.jpg

GB has experimented with wide forks before. Guess this is the next iteration.

I wonder if these will stick around longer than those vaunted Cervelos they were on for a hot minute.

I wonder if this is a TP bike or if the mass start racers - especially the sprinters - will ride them. Or, if like the Cervelos, they'll break and frustrate riders right up to the Olympics.

..... and Hope wheels too

Some more details here:
https://www.cyclingnews.com/news/lot...2020-olympics/

Wow a lot of titanium 3d printing.
-handlebar
-droupout
-most of joints
are all 3d printed. You can also see the layers when you look close.

Hard to tell exactly, but those wheels look very similar in layup and construction to the ones Wiggins used in his hour record- wonder if this is the next iteration.

Wow. This is wide:

https://i.imgur.com/OQoT3YQ.jpg

I didn't realize it's that wide.

I think you are right.

Remember when compact frames were all the rage a few years ago. For a given size, using shorter tubes for the front and rear triangles made for stiffer frames? I wonder if the opposite is happening here with that long and wide rear triangle. What happens when a 225lb/102kg guy twists 2,500W through there?

I always called BS on the Cervelo being appropriate for the Sprinters, too. Cervelo makes aero bikes. That's their focus. Not strong bikes. Same with Argon 18 (AUS).

TT Bike companies and Engineering companies (Lotus) get excited when you say they the idea is to make something "as aero as possible"...and then that becomes the focus, not strength.

When making a top-tier sprint bike they should start with an anvil and then try to make it an aerodynamic anvil...without weakening it. (That's essentially what a BT Stealth was, hahaha)

When a sprinter has 100% faith that his/her frame and components can handle more than they can possibly deliver through them, THAT'S when you'll get super-human efforts.

Lingering doubts ("Will my wheel slip?", "Will my strap let my foot out?", "Will my tire rub?", "Will my stem break?"), cause the rider to subconsciously hold back power.

All it takes if for one slip in training to plant a seed of doubt for days or weeks.

i had the same questions and opinion. Asked someone who has a bit of “knowledge”, and the time differences to be made are astonishing. To the point that I don’t think even the sprinters would care if it felt like a wet noodle underneath them.

I learned a while back that 1 mph is about 1.5 feet per second, so if you're going 1.5 mph faster than the other rider you're gaining 1.5 feet every second.

At 30 mph you go 44 feet a second, it takes about 7 seconds to cover 100m. Every mph is 11 feet gained, so if you're going 32 mph you'll beat your 30 mph opponent by 22 feet. That's a huge margin, even if it's not a lot of time (few tenths of a second).

For certain disciplines, it seems that gaining a bit of speed up top, maybe as much as 1-3 mph, would outweigh the stiffness factor.

Of course, since I'm one to lean towards a stiff bike, I'm biased towards a solid bike. But my (only) track bike is a skinny steel tubed thing and is not very stiff, and I seemed to be okay on it. I did wish for a more solid BB feel though.

An elite team pursuit team puts out more watts on the start than a decent national-tier sprinter does in a flying 200, and the Cervelo T4 has been the bike of choice on the world cup circuit for the team pursuit for the past, what, decade? Only recently matched by Argon18. So I think the problem is less "Cervelo can't figure out how to make a strong bike" and more "this partnership delivered a product a month before its trial by fire with no time for meaningful iteration." Nobody gets anything right the first time and I am not surprised that we're seeing this bizarre new GB bike before the World Cups start. I'm sure that they want to figure out which of those gracefully attached 3d-printed bolted-on spiderweb components are going to break before they go to Tokyo.

(FWIW I talked to some people sprinting on Argon18s and they love 'em. By "some people" I mean "some people who race World Cups.")

I'm not talking about if the bike would be appropriate for average sprinters. I'm talking about the sprinters on Teams GB and AUS who are on the tail end of the bell curve when it comes to making torque (not watts) on the bike.

Torque is what flexes (and sometimes breaks) a bike, not average watts.

EDIT:

I did write about watts above and that's misleading. I mention 2,500W because that's the common unit of measure when we discuss strength on the bike. We know what a high watt value is...I couldn't tell you want a high torque value is from memory. The connection I was trying to make is that it takes a significant amount of torque to produce 2,500W instantaneously.

Torque makes things flex. Torque makes things slip. Torque makes things break.

While we are on the subject, the Argon 18 bike seems to be more similar than different when compared to the TK1 / TK FRD, namely because of the bayonet system. Is it similar, or significantly different?

I see 2 things with the Argon 18 Electron Pro that would give me pause:

- Steel track ends (as opposed to titanium). Ti is known to allow nuts to grip better.
- That seatpost top rail thing. Those tend to creep backwards.

Real talk (and not just fishing), do you friends have any gripes about it? I know top sprinters had A LOT of gripes about the TK1's first few iterations. Thankfully Felt responded quickly with changes (some worked, some didn't), until they got something stable.

Why are you talking about torque and not force? As far as I understand it, crank length is constant during these efforts.

-ilan

Maybe we should be.

and forceApply force to the pedals and it creates torque and load to the frame.

Chainstays and the downtube take the forces, I reckon it looks to be plenty stiff enough.
I'll ask one of the scientist's their opinions later but I reckon they're looking to manage flow over and behind the legs.



This better be an early prototype, it's pretty bush league comparatively

Applying force to the pedals (and to the handlebars) creates stress on the frame and on the components which results in strain on the frame and on the components. This is how power meters work, they use strain gauges.

The problems cited in this thread occur when stress surpasses the elastic limit of the material, the so-called yield point, when the material no longer behaves elastically, that is, no longer returns to its original state when stress is removed.

-ilan

Not familiar with the felt system but the argon has a false steerertube topcap equivalent for regular stem/bars, that's if riders aren't using any printed ti goodies

You can use a standard fork with a TK1 or TK FRD, provided that you have the correct 40mm offset. Actually the TK1 uses that standard fork option to keep costs low and the TK FRD has the more expensive bayonet system.

It's always been like that since the first generation. Michael Blatchford used a TK1 with a standard fork and stem in the 2008 Olympics. My guess is because the bayonet system had more play than he wanted.

The TK1/TKFRD is simply a Felt DA modified for the track. The DA is a dedicated TT bike.

Same goes for the LOOK 496.

I think the BT Stealth was the last (available to the public) sprint bike that was built from the ground up to be a sprint bike. Every other sprint bike was simply a TT bike with drop bars installed. Hand-me-down tech.

Team GB and FES had some dedicated bikes, but those were unobtainable. Felt also has an unobtainable bike...but it's a TT bike, hahahaha

Sprinters will just have to suffer with hand-me-downs, again.

Has there ever been a bike that was designed for sprinting, as in no designed to be used with aerobars? Only drop bars, only for sprinting.

I think corners get cut when there is "one bike to do everything". With all of the money being spent, why not simply make THREE bikes:

- Mass start
- Sprint (match sprint, keirin, team sprint)
- Time Trial

I bet if you let the engineers pursue 3 unrelated tracks you'll get 3 different, highly specialized, great bikes.

The T5 is not one bike but two. Sprinters rode a frame that had different main tube shapes and weighed significantly more. This was to increase stiffness at a minor cost to aerodynamics. A T5 sprint frame weighs as much as an average steel frame. They also contained so much high mod carbon that they were very fragile in crashes (remember stiffness is not the same as strength). The reported breakages with the T5 in 2016 however were due to manufacturing errors. Cervélo was required by Team GB to use a British manufacturer as opposed to their California facility or overseas factories because of funding restrictions. The manufacturer took certain liberties with the manufacturing process of part of the frame and thus some frames broke in the lead up to the 2016 games. Frame geometry for both the sprint and enduro frame were specified by Team GB with no direct input by Cervélo.

The original plan was for the T5 to be a 2020 bike. The project progressed quickly enough however that it was pushed into service in 2016. Management changed at Cervélo and they cut the Team GB deal short and paid them out. Can't blame them either since during the sponsorship period more Cervélo track bikes were given to team GB than were sold. There's unlikely to be new production Cervélo track bike anytime and despite the appearance of the T4 on the website and in marketing material no T4 frames have been produced in the last 18 months and Cervélo no longer works with the factory that built that frame.

now that's some interesting inside baseball. so GB sent a drawing of a Katsanis to Cervelo and said "make it more aerodynamic," and Cervelo added some thicker wavey lines around it and sent it to some British manufacturer and said "make it strong enough" and with all that i can't be surprised at all that the partnership didn't last. from what i can tell there's only one T5GB still in use - everyone else is back on Katsanis or the ever-popular T4.

Thanks, @rustymongrel. @queerpunk, yeah, lol.

I think it would have been easier to simply put a "Cervelo" sticker on Katsanis' bikes (I didn't know the designer's name until now) :D

I think that whole fiasco illustrates that making a bike for Powerlifters (or athletes as strong as powerlifters) isn't easy.

Well I mean there was a bit more work on Cervélos end than that but yeah. The British manufacturer thing was some sort of caveat with the money British cycling gets from the lottery if I recall correctly. They weren’t even a bike manufacturer, as far as I know the T5 is the only bike they’ve ever made. The feeling from Cervélo engineers was that it could have been an even better bike if they weren’t stuck using a manufacturer that they’d never dealt with before. It did beat the old UKSI bikes in stiffness and aero by a large margin though.

Something that raised my eyebrows about this new 2020 bike is that Lotus is involved. The engineer at Cervélo that headed the T5 project works at Lotus now. Somehow I doubt that’s a coincidence.

Oh, I forgot to mention this regarding the T5 sales: I think Cervelo may have expected poor sales. Did they even try to sell the bikes? Usually when top tier bikes like these (L96, R96, BT Stealth/Edge, etc...), somebody will buy them and show up at Masters or Elite Nationals. Did even that much happen with T5s?

Maybe Cervelo was in it for advertising only all-along. Like Nike making shoes for Cav, but not having sold cycling shoes to the general public in over 15 years. I think he's on Specialized shoes now, but he was a Nike guy for a long time.

https://cvndsh.com/nike/

As far as I’m aware not a single one was sold to the public. I think that had more to do with British cycling not wanting them sold than anything else.

I was was told to tell anyone that asked that it would be 100,000 GBP for the frameset and then you had to go buy your special bars and whatever else from UKSI.

ha
not surprised.
that was basically what they did with the UKSI bikes, too. "Sure, we sell them, we just price them so high and with such a long or unspecified production time that it's clear to anybody with a brain in their box that we're not going to sell them."