Fast Bike?

Here’s the bad news.  You can’t buy speed.

For those who want to worship at the altar of Speed, I have bad news.  Buy the fastest lightest bike on the market.  Eat the fastest food.  (I’m not talking about McDonalds here, but rather that gunk in tubes and bottles.)  Get the fastest kit, and the fastest shoes.  Buy yourself some of those little tiny weird fast gloves.  Acquire the fast helmet.  By all means, do all that.  But I’m sorry to tell you this, it’s not going to make you any faster.

A slow rider on a fast bike is still going to be slow.

A fast rider on a slow bike is still going to be a fast rider.  Sadly, the converse is also true.

So why do manufacturers build these fast machines?  And why do the super racers ride them?

Short answer:  Money!

Longer answer:  For the very best of riders, the difference between one bike and another is extremely small, but victories are made up of these small differences.  For the rest of the world, they build those things so that people will buy them.  Speed is an easy sell.

You can’t buy speed.  You can buy efficiency.

A light and lively bike is a joy to ride…  for a little while.  Unfortunately, the really and truly fast, dedicated, racing machines are not very comfortable.  If they are truly serious, no compromise, racing bikes, then everything else is secondary.  They are designed and built to be fast.  That’s not comfortable, and that’s not long-term reliable.  For the overwhelming number of casual and recreational riders, such a machine is going to be uncomfortable fairly quickly, and it’s going to be a maintenance headache.

Let’s face it, the difference between a reasonably quick, decently comfortable, highly reliable road bike, and an all out racing machine boils down to two factors.  1) About seven pounds.  2) $7,000.00.

There is one other difference between a good sound recreational bike and a red hot racing rig.  With only moderate maintenance (read less than a hundred dollars and less than 10 hours) the good recreational rig will run all season long.  On the other hand, the full-bore racing rid, with extremely close expert maintenance (hundreds of dollars and hours) has a mean time to failure of about 100 hours.  That doesn’t mean the bike is finished.  It just means that, even with the absolute best care, it will only go about 100 hours before something breaks.  (Usually something expensive and unrepairable.)

I’m not down on top the line racing bikes.  But let us maintain a sense of proportion here.  Think about the difference between a Mazda Miata and a Ferrari 458 Italia.