Originally Posted by
VegasJen
I've been shopping for triathlon bikes a lot lately, and I know this isn't one, but it might be a very good compromise with some clamp on aero bars.
You wouldn't be the first person to strap aero bars on them, but they don't have a TT/Tri-oriented geometry. Depending on your required fit, it may be challenging or impossible to get the saddle far enough forward and the aerobars in an ideal position. Even if you achieve an appropriate fit, your weight distribution may feel awkwardly forward because of the bike's relatively short front-center.
Some folks make road-to-TT/Tri conversions work, but unless you have a well-founded plan, I wouldn't go in with high confidence that optimal results will ensue. People often end up just configuring the bike as "road posture but with aerobars"; this is fine for some purposes, but if you're putting together a serious race fit, it tends to leave a good chunk of the aerobars' aerodynamic gains on the table.
Originally Posted by
Iride01
Your Roubaix must be from the previous century too if it weighs 22 lbs.
The OP said 2006, but I'm not sure that 22lbs would be that strange for even a
current Roubaix. I haven't seen published weights for the base model, but the 105-equipped Sport is reported to run a little over 19lbs out of the box. If we're talking about weight as the bicycle sits in someone's garage ready-to-ride, that could easily climb to over 20lbs once we've added pedals, cages, toolkit. Since the base model has Tiagra instead of 105, and comes stock with lower-end wheels and tires, 22lbs doesn't seem like a stretch.
Originally Posted by
tempocyclist
Handling from the geometry may not be as polished. Might be sketchy at high speeds. I do not know though as I haven't ridden one, I just wouldn't expect a bike of that era to match that of a modern bike.
According to Trek's catalogs, the Y-Foil road bikes had pretty conventional handling geometry. A 54cm Y-Foil from 1999 has very similar handling geo to a 54cm Emonda today: same head angle with a 2mm difference in fork offset, same chainstay length with a 2mm difference in total wheelbase, and nominally a bottom bracket height difference of a few millimeters.
Heck, these numbers aren't dramatically difference from my 1983 Miyata. Its 73-degree head angle, 45mm fork offset, 74-degree seat angle, and 415mm chainstays would all look pretty normal on a road bicycle launched today; its front-center is a bit longer than the current norm, but not wildly.
The handling geometry of typical performance road bikes hasn't seen major shifts in a very long time.
Probably quite flexy. A lot of those early Treks were (my early 2000's Trek 5200 is certainly not as stiff as my modern bike).
I have no experience riding Y-Foils, but I'd question whether a 5200 is a good predictor of how a Y-Foil will feel. These are very different ways of constructing a frame.
Even if it is flexy, this may or may not be a problem. The notion that stiffness about the bottom bracket correlates perfectly with a frame's pedaling quality is popular, but I'm not sure that my experience supports the simple narrative. For instance, my '79 Fuji feels a lot flexier than my Emonda, but I don't mind because it feels like it rolls with my pedal stroke instead of fighting against it. I've also ridden very stiff bikes that my legs
didn't seem to get along with, where my impression was more "kicking a brick wall" than "rocket ship."