GERARD’S GAME
THE MAN BEHIND THE BIKE GIVES US THE LOWDOWN ON THE 3T’S GEARING AND MORE
CyclingPlus: A 1x road bike is a bold move, so what inspired you to create the Strada?
Gerard Vroomen: I’m a big fan of French writer and poet Antoine de Saint Exupéry who said: “perfection is attained not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing more to remove.” Looking at the bike, the front derailleur is such a crude part; a bunch of plates pushing against the chain until it falls off. Whereas the rear derailleur is like a piece of art, like a Swiss watch.
It’s not as if we wanted to remove the front derailleur come hell or high water, we simply wanted to combine ‘speed’ with ‘comfort’ so removing obstacles becomes part of the aerodynamic equation, just like bigger tyres help on the comfort side, if you can find a way for them not to hurt the aerodynamics. Almost everything has been looked at for aerodynamics, except really the drivetrain. Then with 1x, everything comes together.
I started thinking about this about 10 years ago, but the drivetrains weren’t there. With an eight- or nine-speed cassette it’s hard to do 1x for the road, but now with 11-speed it works.
CP: Aerodynamics played a huge part in your time at Cervélo, so is the simplifying of the bottom bracket shell area something you’d already looked into?
GV: I thought about it as a concept about 10 years ago, but it stopped as soon as I did the maths on the number of cogs it would need. CP:
The Strada seems to set new standards in comfort for an aero road bike. How much of that is down to the increase in tyre size or the frame itself?
GV: It’s 90 per cent the tyre size. On the one side you have a bunch of triangles made out of one of the stiffest materials known to man, on the other you have a piece of rubber filled with air. It wasn’t so much ‘do we want bigger tyres’ as ‘how can we make bigger tyres aero in the frame?’. The result was very little clearance. CP:
Have disc brakes freed up the design details, and will we see any significant aero applications when it comes to disc/rotor/hub design?
GV: Most armchair bike designers think disc brakes are bad aerodynamically, but when you start optimising it that’s actually not the case. The first aero bikes with disc brakes weren’t great, as they were rim-brake bikes with disc brakes slapped on them. But once you optimise the fork crown for the fact that there’s no brake there anymore, integrate the calliper a little into the fork leg, have rim designs that are not compromised by needing a brake surface all of that changes. Of course, there will be further component development, but I’m not sure making the callipers aero will be a good idea as by definition more aero means less cooling...