Specialzed had finally start doing something about their race of triathlon and Time Trial Bike. Yes, they have finally come out with a Carbon Fiber Version. For the last few years, Specialized have been producing their Flagship Triathlon Bike in E5 Aerotec Aluminium alloy.
This is what Specialized Founder and President Mike Sinyard said:
“We wanted to do it a year or two ago and said let’s wait instead of doing it and saying ‘aw, we should’ve done this or that,’” said Specialized founder and president Mike Sinyard. “This is an awesome platform that we have now proven in the wind tunnel. It’s something we can build on. It’s a beautiful foundation.”
TESTING PROTOCOL
First, guided by Andy Jacques-Maynes, a pro road and cyclocross racer who also serves as one of the engineers at Specialized and marketing manager Nic Sims, we took a tour of their testing lab amid the inner workings of the massive factory. In there a new Transition frame was under fire, undergoing a vertical load test to simulate a rider hitting potholes and sending rider weight through the seat and through the frame. This test would typically go for one full day to pass basic standards, but Specialized will generally let it go two to three times above that standard. They bike underwent pedaling fatigue goes 100,000 cycles, which takes two days. That is to say, it’s the bike is no pixie and is put through the wringers, built to take whatever you can put through it.
THE GEOMETRY
Like any good tri bike, the Transition Carbon was built with aerodynamics and fit being paramount features. The front-end of the bike will feature a 1” steerer and a fork with an alloy steerer. A big clean-air advocate, Reid agreed with this growing reversal from the 1 1/8” industry standard. “I never understood why we went to 1 1/8th,” Reid said. “You see these huge, bulky front ends. That’s increased surface area. I’m so glad to see one-inch this on the Transition.”
When asked why not a carbon steerer, we received an interesting reply.
“First, we don’t have the build capabilities for a one-inch carbon steerer,” Jacques-Maynes said. “But what that alloy steerer allows us to do is build up a crown with less material. So, as we built it, we considered that the fork goes into the steerer at an angle. We shaved away material from under the crown, so that it runs level with the wind angle.” What that means is that wind passing over the tire and under the fork crown goes cleanly into a smooth cowling at the top underside of the downtube.
That upper portion of the downtube is another area of attention. To either side lay a couple of two-inch-long gussets. While it helps provide a continuous surface for wind coming off the upper part of the fork and onto the frame, it also serves structural function, stiffening the front end immensely.
Another beauty element is the chainstays and seatstays. To create a rear end with minimal wind exposure, the stays were brilliantly designed, staying parallel from their point of origin at the bottom bracket, to radically flare out toward alloy horizontal dropouts. In fact, the chainstays exist in the wind shadow of the bottom bracket shell, a first. “Like the Roval wheels, we wanted to keep this frame as narrow as possible and hide the stays,” Jacques Maynes said. The inside of the stays will feature slight curvature to follow the curved contours of a lenticular disc or flared deep rear wheel like a Zipp. Also of note, the flare-out points are parallel to the ground and frontal wind angle.
While the mainframe sections are a NACA-approved airfoil shape, the fork has a different shape, slightly blunted at the leading edge. “We learned about aero sections at MIT,” Callahan said. “We worked with a professor there to fine tune the head tube and fork for aerodynamics. It’s clean air and we want to keep it that way. For the fork, the NACA profile doesn’t work at low speed there.”
Jacques-Maynes added: “While triathlon is our market with this bike, we have UCI considerations to figure in as well. The minimum UCI width for the tubes is 25mm. The max height allowed by the UCI is 80mm, and to meet the three-to-one ratio, our max was 75mm. And we just barely squeeze into the rules for a double diamond. We’re pretty much running it to the millimeter, maxing out our ability to stay within the rules. We got pretty creative, actually.”
At a constant two centimeters wide from front to back, the wafer-thin top tube is a marvel. “I really love this about the bike,” Reid said. “When you’re racing hard, your knees will often come in a bit, and having the top tube out of the way, not knocking into them, is a great thing.”
Regarding fit geometry, Specialized is taking conventional wisdom about seat angles and throwing them to the wind. On this bike, 76 degree, or 78 degrees won’t exist. “It’s irrelevant. You take the whole ideal of seat angle out, Jacques-Maynes says. “It’s based on a style of thinking where bikes are made of tubeset going from the bottom bracket to the saddle. With monologue carbon, it’s totally different. You start with setback, adjust the bars, then adjust the setback again until dialed.
“Instead of seat angle, we talk about setback, where the nose of the saddle is in relation to the bottom bracket,” Jacques-Maynes said. “We talked at length with Dan Empfield about fit, and this is compatible with his FIST fitting system. His X-Y coordinates are with stack and reach, we go X-Y with the rise and nose of the saddle to fit riders. We’ll have an education through our SBU courses on how our retailers will fit athletes, and really, it’s quite a simple system. Since we don’t have straight seat tubes to do a sorta-close fit, this is the best way to get an honest, accurate fit.”
Additionally, because of the seat post’s dead vertical rise or fall, it doesn’t affect the fore or aft of the saddle position. That is, when you raise the saddle on the post, you don’t have to adjust the saddle fore and aft in parallel, as you have to with standard angled tube sets.
The bike will feature a zero-offset post and one with about an inch and a half of layback. The ovalized aluminum rail clamp is flip-flop reversible. There will also be a super-layback version made exclusively for their UCI teams (Gerolsteiner and QuickStep/Innergetic) allowing the riders to stay within UCI regulations for saddle fore/aft. The posts need a minimum of 80mm of post going into the frame at minimum, 105cm at max. So, consumers will have to have their posts cut. Dealers will be supplied with a test-only adjustable post that will work for parking lot tests for potential consumers, to help determine an optimal post height. Once determined, the Specialized dealer’s post cutting kit will get it locked in.
For those getting their bikes worked on in the shops, Specialized is also providing dealers a part to clamp onto the frame with a round outcropping, which will then be able to be clamped into a standard work stand.
Like the Felt DA, the engineers of the Transition wanted to take the rear brake out if its traditional place. But instead of hollowing out a cowling in the bottom bracket shell, Specialized opted to keep the BB shell stiffness intact there and fashioned their own center-pull brakes, a’la cyclocross, fixed to brake studs. The design allowed them to keep the brake cable and any housing in line with the frame. On the front, the brake cable is fed to a cable guide that will be built into the integrated headset’s top cap. In the rear, the brake cable will come out at the base of the downtube and feed direct to the brake for powerful center pull action.
A dream for bike builders, the internal cable run at the front of the top tube will feature rear brake and front and rear derailleur housings that run from port-in at the front of the top tube to port-out at their respective locations. A fourth porthole will be allocated for a SRM internal cable run down to the crankset. “With 4mm housing, you just shove it in and it comes out where it’s supposed to,” Jacques-Maynes says. “Shops and guys that like to work on their own bikes are gonna love it.”
Sizing will run small, medium, large and extra large and the head tube lengths are among the shortest in the biz, allowing for a low front end At 6’0, I rode a well-dialed medium with a 120mm head tube, while Reid, at about 6’2, rode an extra large.
OUR RIDE
Reid, on his second ride on the Transition Carbon and I on my maiden voyage managed to steal out for the famed Specialized Lunch Ride, a place where everyone from Andy Jacques-Maynes to the Specialized mail boy is fast. Of course, bring Peter Reid on the ride and everyone jacks it up a bit more with their A-game.
Our first impression was “where’d the bike go?” That super-thin top tube was impressive looking down, which put us to the first test: whipping the front end and forth to see just how stiff it really was torsionaly. The aero “wings” that transition wind off the fork and onto the frame actually serve as a torsional brace, adding front-end stiffness.
Any concerns about rear-end stiffness on this compact were also put to rest. With the rear brake being mounted under the bottom bracket shell instead of within the shell/tube set juncture, the area was optimally beefy, and in turn, very stiff out of saddle
While Reid and Jacques-Maynes were at the sharp end of an attack that strung out the 35-odd guys on the ride (a ride that ended with Reid contesting the sprint—on the Transition), I was eventually spit out the back. Which was fine, as it gave me a chance to put my dragging tongue back in my mouth, have a recovery chat with fellow shelled companion Sinyard, stabilize my heart rate and get into the aerobars to test it alone against the wind.
In the bars, it was exceptional. With a shorter headtube than many brands are offering out there, Specialized got it right, allowing those who want to get low to do so without having to hunt for a negative-degree stem. While a published weight isn’t out yet, we had to estimate our size medium frame at somewhere between 18 and 19 pounds with deep-dish Roval tubulars—a very impressive weight range. Looking all over the bike you could really notice how tucked in everything is. Looking forward at Reid’s bike during the ride, you could really marvel at how the chainstays are hidden behind the bottom bracket and how clean the cable run makes the front end. We have no numbers to verify, but if aerodynamics are the gauge (and apparently they are, since Specialized took plastic protos to the MIT tunnel before settling on this final design), the Transition Carbon looks like it belongs among the top five truly aero tri bikes on the market, if not higher. Again, just our two cents of speculation.
The bike has an aptly short top tube for a short, comfy cockpit. A long wheelbase made for a stable bike that tracks really well (especially when blown out the back of a group and barely able to keep upright). It won’t win any crits as a super-nimble cornering bike, but granted, it’s designed for straight-line speed, not Alpine switchbacks.
The front end climbed well, which, per our whipping-front-end test, was no surprise. Jacques-Maynes backed my findings. “We as road bike riders have a different standard for our own machines and can’t accept a bike with bad ride characteristics, especially in the front end,” he said. “So we paid a lot of attention to geometry, fit and layup for compliance. When we talk about performance bikes we look at front end stiffness, bottom bracket stiffness and ride compliance. But stiffness was a key factor for us.”
We also got our first ride on the Roval Rapide wheelset as well. Looking down at the front wheel while on the road, it looked like riding a three-spoke with the flanges so narrow. The wheels rode fast and even with the narrow flange, the length of flange made them immensely stiff. We’re surprised these wheels aren’t getting much play out there, but imagine we may see more of them as a new 55mm carbon tubular version is hitting the market.
Our first try of the TriTip saddle, which will come in two widths, was a total surprise. It has Specialized’s Body Geometry cutout and frankly, I’d not been a fan of the shape nor comfort when perched out of the saddle nose. This one has gel in the aft as well as through a wide, cush, supple nose, which felt really good when perched upon in the aerobars. It wasn’t a Princess and the Pea saddle with too much cushion, but offered just enough to take the edge off focal nose riding.
Reid agreed. I’ve always shied away from the saddles,” he said. “When I saw it I said ‘I’ll ride it, but I know I won’t like it.’ I got on it and it was surprising—I really liked it. I could easily do the whole ride in the aero position. By the end, I asked if I could take two home with me!
After two good rides on the Transition Carbon, we wanted Reid’s feedback, a guy with a history of very, very finicky wants and needs out of an aero bike, having required a custom frame from Specialized with a super-short headtube to get the flat-backed fit he demanded for Kona. And when he said he would test it, he wasn’t kidding.
“I got here and within two hours I was out on the bike,” Reid said. “They said ‘hey, we’ve got this guy we’d like to have you roll out with,” and I said ‘No. I want to go by myself. I want to ride it hard, I want to take it through turns. No touristy ride. I really wanted to see what this thing was made of.
“I’ve always ridden custom frames and at first was… hopeful. I rode out an hour and 15 minutes—hard—1:15, turned around and rode back in an hour. I thought ‘I could win Hawaii on this thing.’ This bike is a huge advantage. It makes you want to ride fast. It doesn’t feel like at TT bike. You get out of the saddle, it feels like a road bike. It corners well, it’s stiff, responsive. My tri bike has never felt this way. Usually with aero forks, you can feel it sway. This thing is so stiff. It feels like a road bike.”
We wanted to know about the front end, a stickler area with so many athletes who complain they can’t get low enough, and the frame’s narrow build. Reid, one of the biggest proponents for a short head tube to allow low aerobar positioning, was impressed on both counts. “I’m fairly tall and the only way I could keep up with the stronger guys in Kona was to make myself as aero as possible. That was a big reason I ha to go custom with a 110mm head tube. With this, I had to actually put a spacer under the stem. It’s the first time I’ve ever had to do that. I didn’t have to make one adjustment on the ride.
“I tend to ride knock-kneed. I liked a narrow top tube, and this so skinny top tube was really sweet. You can ride really tight. I’ve been riding aluminum bikes all my career, and I’d feel the jarring a bit. This is the first time I’ve ridden a carbon tri bike, and it dampens everything.”
MODELS
Four models and two framesets will complete the Transition range for 2008. Capping the group will be the top-end Transition S-Works, which will feature the S-Works FACT 9R carbon layup (all other Transition frames will feature the 7R carbon layup). The S-Works will price at $7,000 and will be spec’ed with a Zipp Vuka Aero aerobar, SRAM Red 10-speed groupset with SRAM Force aero shifters, chain and brake levers and Zipp 404 carbon clinchers. The bike will come with two carbon posts: one with zero offset, one with layback.
Without a definitive date of release but in the works for the S-Works model as an upgrade is a version with SRM built into its own carbon S-Works crankset and oversized bottom bracket. That crankset that will be a fourth the weight of a Dura-Ace crankset and 15 percent stiffer thanks to a tighter crankarm interface with more splines.
Below the S-Works will be the Transition Pro at $4,000, outfitted with Shimano Dura-Ace 10-speed and Roval Fusee Star wheelset. Next along the line is the $3,000 Transition Expert featuring a mix of Shimano Dura-Ace and Ultegra, and Mavic Ksyrium Equipe wheels. At the entry level at a very impressive $2,500 will be the Transition Comp. Same frame as the two above, it will come with Shimano 105 and a Mavic Aksium wheelset. Each of these bikes will come with one aero post, either a zero-offset or layback, consumer’s choice.
All bikes will feature the new Specialized TriTip saddle.
In framesets will be the S-Works module, which will include frame, fork, custom components to fit (2 posts, crankset, brakes, headset, stem, That headset will have that top cap with integrated cable guide.
Down the line will be an aero bottle with shape to match the downtube/seattube section, creating a consistent aero wall through the area. We had a look at the prototype and it looked pretty sweet.
All in all, Specialized managed to put four or five truly new features into one bike in the Transition Carbon. With some unofficial spy photos having made the Internet rounds, Specialized was bummed to see it peeked to the public beforehand, but impressed with the chatter around it.
“It’s fulfilling to bring it from idea to prototype to preproduction to production, to being delivered to consumers here in the coming months,” Jacques-Maynes said. “Seeing the buzz around it, people looking at a picture of it on the internet, it’s like wow. I guess there’s interest.”
Sinyard echoed the sentiment. “It’s exciting, it’s great to see Peter so excited. That is our formula. If we can make the product the top athletes love, then it’s a winner.”
Specialized’s engineering team will make another trip to the wind tunnel in early June to return with hard numbers to pass to all of us that require such data. And when you’re spending this much money on a bike, it’s not a big ask. In the meantime, Specialized will be looking at a debut of the bike at the Roth Challenge by Chris McCormack.
Again, the bike is expected to be available beginning in January. More info on the Transition Carbon as it comes will be found at specialized.com
No comments:
Post a Comment