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TOUR TECH: UP CLOSE: LANCE'S 2010 TREK SPEED CONCEPT TT BIKE
Zap
July 22, 2009
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Remember When...
The year was 1999 and the U.S. Postal team (later Discovery Channel) was making it's first mark on what would eventually become a seven consecutive year stamp on the Tour de France. With their new Trek Bicycle sponsorship came a fleet of OCLV Carbon road bikes...but no TT bike worth Lance's effort (actually, finding a carbon TT bike in 1999 period would've been close to impossible). In one of history's most noteworthy examples of re-branding, Trek went out and bought a small stable of titanium Litespeed Blades and threw some Trek stickers on the downtube. Following that French masquerade of '99, Trek president John Burke vowed to never again to have someone else's bike run with Trek stickers so the decision was made to develop their own OCLV Carbon TT bike.
What About Lance's Latest Bikes?
While I was in the press room at the Tour each day, I noticed that whenever Lance took questions from the stable of sweaty, smelly, over-caffeinated journos they always focused on the same drama - Lance versus Contador. Not that there wasn't enough substance in that drama to keep them busy typing, but the one question I wanted to ask, but never had the opportunity to, was to find out what Lance thought of his new bike. Well, I tried that tack from the source, but came up empty handed...I guess he had more important things to deal with.
Lance warms up on his old TTX in 2005. The New Speed Concept bike is around 200 grams lighter. While Trek works to make the new bike "saleable" (per UCI regulations) look for the TTX to remain in the 2010 Trek catalog.
Team liasion Ben Coates said that while Alberto used the Dauphine as a shakedown race for his new 2010 TT bike, Lance used a local TT in Glenwood Springs, CO. for his maiden voyage on the new Speed Concept bike. Imagine showing up for your local podunk TT ready to do the business on your road bike with the aero extensions and all of a sudden Lance Armstrong shows up for a shake-out ride aboard his his wicked looking Trek Speed Concept bike!
One of the TT bikes that Lance has on hand in France has a playful paint scheme which belies the bike's serious intent. Only three riders on the team: Lance, Levi and Alberto were aboard the all new Speed Concept TT bikes which, aside from their Wisconsin manufacture with Trek's own OCLV Carbon, are a radical departure from the previous TTX which the rest of the team is still riding. Curiously, Andreas Kloden used the old style bike to score one of the team's top finish in Monaco.
As Trek's team liaison Ben Coates explained it, the heart of the new TT bike design are the "Kamm Tail" tubes, basically aero tubes that are cut off flat on the trailing side. The newly shaped tubes have a "super aero effect" according to Ben and they are used for the forks, down tube and seat tube. It was these shapes that the white camo paint job used on Contador's bike used in the Dauphine' were intended to disguise. Although the tubes fall within the UCI's mandated 3:1 ratio, the Kamm Tail tricks the air into acting as if the tubes were actually on a 4:1 ratio. Besides their straight line performance, the unique tube shapes also provide a big performance gain at yaw (under crosswind conditions). The top tube message on Lance's bike reads, "Never Forget Your Beginner's Spirit."
As has become the rage with all the fast TT bikes (and more and more road bikes), everything that can be run internally is. The new Speed Concept bikes run both custom Bontrager center-pull brakes out of sight and, more importantly, out of the wind. The brakes were designed in-house by Trek's chief TT guru, Doug Cusack.
Undoubtedly one of the trickest parts of the new Trek TT bike is the front end which is made up of a combination of compartments to allow access to the stem, brakes and steerer tube. The top plate of the stem is removable by four bolts on the stem's underside. The heart of the cockpit is made up of a redundant steerer tube system whereby the fork mounts to the underside of the stem and additionally there is a steerer "rod" that runs inside the frame.
We spotted this cryptic message painted on the underside of Lance's TT bike and when we asked what it stood for there was some hesitation for an answer. It seems that nobody - not even Lance - wanted to go on record as to what the inscription meant...but it was eventually whispered to us, "Why Not Win".
Other Bikes On Trek's TT History
This is the Trek TT bike that Lance and the boys relied on from 2000-2005 when the TTX came on board.
Trek's Y-Foil showed up in the late 80's and luckily for Lance the frame shape was odd enough to push it outside of the UCI's allowable frame design template.
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