The CAAD 10 and crashes

Cycling is a sport rife with superstition and tradition. From the obviousness of giving your tyres a pinch before you take a pump to them regardless to the almost arcane fashion statement of leg-shaving, we participate, consciously and unconsciously, in these micro-rituals in the same way that some would cross themselves when talking about friends passed away. Replace pumping inflated tyres with reading learned-by-rote manuscripts and bald legs with bald patches, and we're practically monks.

Some may think it trite of me to compare what is ultimately a fruitless sporting endeavour with religion - a pursuit ultimately called upon to answer the great, unanswerable questions. But, really, in this goal, they are actually one and the same. Cycling has derived this strange facsimile of faith because we rely on it so much - despite all that we have learned about the bike, we still know so little.

We can measure and model and test and strain the frames until there is barely an atom unaccounted for. We can set our angles, our reach, our bottom-bracket deflection. Change ratios and position. Make it lighter. It all matters, and we can quantise and design the bike until it's the most perfect machine ever put together.

But perfect for what?

What does it do?

I didn't even conceive of these questions until I got my race-bike, riding it home with a Bambi-like lack of finesse in heavy fog, as I worked out everything that I needed to adjust about the fit that I could get no idea of whilst stationary. A Cannondale CAAD 10. Probably the best mass-production aluminium frame being sold, a feathery 1150 g for a 58cm frame - designed to race.

Stiffness. That's what I'd been told it had, in reviews and criticisms. Almost too much of it. The bike would beat you black and blue, if you weren't careful. The word brought forth images of steel girders ringing with hammer-strikes, of lamp-post black-eyes and barbell-grip abrasion.

That wasn't what they meant by stiffness, though.

It took me a while to get used to the bike on that first long ride around Tak-ma-doon. I was part-braced, part-coiled. Expecting the worst. That the bike would be less than I had wanted. That it wouldn't change anything.

After years of riding the Allez, I still have never fully warmed to it. For what is obviously a sportive bike, it would still be uncomfortable over any sort of broken road surface. It looks huge - a snarling, rearing beast of a bike, the ludicrously curved top-tube arcing back from the scaffold-pole head-tube, throwing the visual weight of the bike into such a wedge that with a rider on it, you'd be afraid it'd tip over backwards. Lines and cables looping awkwardly out of shifters and hanging off the frame. It has rarely let me down, but I've never fallen for it.

I worried that the CAAD would feel the same. That a bike over a kilogram lighter would still feel leaden. Well, maybe not leaden. Stately.

Or maybe it'd be the opposite. Maybe it'd be hyperactive, ducking and weaving at the slightest movement. Maybe those flattened chainstays would bounce against the tarmac, propelling me forward with a zing that would flow like electricity through my heels.

I was looking for all this, examining every detail, unable to work out what the character of the bike really was. The hesitation or the spark. The only impression I was getting clearly was that it was, against all expectation, comfortable.

Really, really comfortable.

Undoubtedly the GP4000s tyres helped, but I couldn't remember the Allez ever feeling this relaxed even with the exact same wheels and tyres. It helped. I could concentrate on working things out as I climbed Tak-ma-Doon.

A kilo less on the frame changes some things. How fast you accelerate, turn. The whole way the bike feels. Some things, it doesn't change.

Climbing is, and always will be, really hard.

Over the top and down the other side, getting to grips with the brakes. Just rolling and rolling and pushing and trying a sprint and rolling and turning and...

it hit me.

Cannondale hadn't made a bike. Not as I understood the term "bike", anyway.

They'd made a conduit.

With no computer or HRM on-board; no shift indicators above the hoods; I had no call to look down. If I didn't look down... I was floating.

With no undue vibration from the road, the only thing I could feel was my legs working against the pedals... and nothing else. That was what stiffness meant. Hauling on the bars as I sprinted, nothing gave a millimeter. Nothing flexed or complained or... felt like anything at all. I was working against the road. The bike was my tool to do this, but it wasn't contributing or taking away from the process one iota.

Would I have been able to know how this felt from numbers on a sheet of paper? No. Engineers have figures to aim for, but those figures just exist because people have ridden them - and they just feel right. They give you a bike that tells you everything you need to know, and nothing more. That never gets in your way.

It doesn't always work that way.

I switched the stock tyres on the CAAD onto the Allez - Schwalbe Luganos.

Under moderately heavy braking, the front wheel lost grip without warning, planting me heavily on my side, destroying the mech hanger and damaging most of my clothing and a fair bit of my skin. I don't get into many accidents, especially not on the Allez, so I knew where to place the blame. The tyres had given me no information whatsoever that they were about to lose traction, and it was this lack of communication that caused the crash.

In retrospect, they may have improved once worn in, but what happened was still inexcusable for a product on the market - a topic I shall get back onto some other time. It may have been residue left from manufacturing that needed to be scrubbed off before the real tread could engage. Most people seem to get on with Luganos fine.

The luganos are relegated to turbo use, never to be used by me on the road again.

Another superstition is born.