Going Through Hell
In the first of a new series of bike tests, Cyclist gets in the mood for the Classics by thrashing three cobbles bikes on the roads of Roubaix
One race is so famous and so brutal that it has spawned a breed of bike. In the first of a new series, Cyclist takes three cobble-bashing machines to test their performance on the roads of Paris-roubaix
A‘circus’ raced by ‘animals’ orchestrated by ‘sadists’ and tended by ‘convicts’, ParisRoubaix has been called everything from the Hell of the North and Queen of the Classics to ‘bullshit’ (we have Bernard Hinault to thank for that one). It’s a brutal 260km that sets out from Compiegne, 80km north of Paris, at speeds the late Wouter Weylandt described as ‘a bunch sprint in a major Tour’, traverses the rutted agricultural byways of northern France before winding up in a king-making, often heart-breaking one and half laps of the Velodrome Andre-petrieux.
If there’s a cycling equivalent to the Grand National, Paris-roubaix is it. Each year there are busted clavicles, shattered wrists, popped kneecaps and in 1998 Johan Museeuw nearly had to have his leg amputated, so riders and manufacturers have done their utmost to soften the savagery with improvised modifications and specially designed components, giving rise to the term ‘cobbles bike’. There have been wooden rims, spoke-tying, sandpaper on bottle cages, foamwrapped handlebars, 60° seat tubes, elastomer damping… the list goes on.
Innovation reached a crescendo in the 1990s when all manner of suspension technologies were introduced, but those bikes often failed to deliver – or failed altogether – and barring one or two experimental examples, teams seemed content to resume normal service on bikes with wider tyres, double-taped bars and close-ratio gears.
With the advent of carbon, things briefly ratcheted up in the cobble bike stakes when Specialized presented the ‘Zertz inserts’ Roubaix in 2004, then Trek rebuffed the challenge with the similarly elastomer-damped Madone SPA (Suspension Performance Advantage) a year later. But while the Roubaix ploughed on, the SPA never went into production. For a time the Cervélo R3 demonstrated that all you needed to win Paris-roubaix was clever carbon engineering, but eventually Trek rejoined the party in 2012 and kicked it all off again with the Domane, whose rear-damped chassis helped propel Fabian Cancellara to Strade Bianche victory on its first official outing, then conquered Roubaix and Flanders a year later. The arms race was back on.
Today there’s a slew of bikes that could call themselves cobblesspecific, or at least, cobbles-adept: the Lapierre Pulsium, Pinarello Dogma K8-S, Bianchi Infinito CV, Look 695, Cervélo R3, to name a few. However, three bikes stood out to us, each for very different reasons. So we thought we’d put them to the test, and what better place to do it than their spiritual home? Bring on the cobbles.
He is Spartacus
With me on today’s ride are Rob and Sam, both Cyclist staffers, and strapped to the roof of our borrowed Peugeot 2008 are a Specialized Roubaix Pro Di2, a Trek Domane SLR 7 Disc and a Cannondale Synapse Hi-mod Disc Team.
Rob’s rationale for choosing the Domane is pretty simple: he rode the
‘Two soigneurs literally had to carry Cancellara to his chair. He looked properly dead behind the eyes’
original in the Paris-roubaix sportive in 2013 and wants to see how this new version compares. Rob recalls how he saw Cancellara at the end of the pro race that same year: ‘Two soigneurs literally had to carry him to his chair. He looked properly dead behind the eyes. Someone eventually plucked up the courage to ask him how he felt, and he just replied, “I’m f****ing f****ed.” Then they carried him away.’
Cancellara had just won a third Paris-roubaix, preceded by triumphing in the Tour of Flanders a week earlier. No wonder he was royally done in, but one can’t help but wonder how much more he would have suffered without the Domane underneath him – and perhaps