Is it even possible to build a better bike?
The R&D arm of the southern California bike giant Specialized is known inside the organization as integrated technologies. The department consists of engineers and design specialists working with the application of aerodynamics, composite materials, structural engineering and people dynamics – all toward building better road bikes. The frame designs that will be unveiled during the 2019 Classics season (and beyond) are conceived here.
A separate accelerator business unit sits outside integrated technologies. That group focuses on moon shots and how seemingly impossible ideas are made real using ergometers, Vo2-measuring equipment, suspension-testing machines and the company’s own wind tunnel – anything that yields a number that can be analyzed. Within the accelerator group, future iterations of existing products – the next Tarmac, for example – are fined-tuned.
Chris Yu, a mechanical engineer and current director of integrated technologies at Specialized, has spent more than six years inside the company’s technology group. Talking specifically about bikes, he finds it difficult to see frame layups changing dramatically from what’s available today.
“From a pure technology and structural-efficiency perspective, one of the things we’ve found is that bike frame and fork structure is incredibly complex – in many ways, the scale at which we’re shaping frames today is more complex than F1, even aerospace parts,” Yu says.
Two generations of Tarmac ago, for example, a bike was built using 300 pieces of carbon – a large number given their weight and the frame’s low mass. From work done inside integrated technologies, one of today’s Tarmacs is made using more than 500, which yield a stiffer and faster machine, but also add significant complexity to the manufacturing process. Inside Specialized, the focus is now on how to optimize the use of existing materials, recognizing that across all segments – road, gravel, cyclocross and mountain – the quality of what’s being produced today is already at an incredibly high standard.
“There could be a larger shift,” Yu explains over the phone, opining about how frame designs might soon change. “But it won’t be far from what we know cycling to be today.”
Back at Ridley at the company’s Belgian HQ, Wils considers frame optimization, maintaining that changes will come both from the continued application of technology to design, but more drastically from broader changes that might come from the cycling industry and the sport’s governing body – the uci.
The uci has very specific rules dictating various features of a bike. For example, a road bike has to weigh in at 6.8 kg. The rule came about to ensure bike safety and to keep riders from drilling out parts. But the rule harkens more to the age of steel bikes, less the current carbon-fibre era. It is possible to build a race bike that weighs less than 6.8 kg. Wils says that a more modern testing method for determining frame and component safety would allow things to go lighter while still being durable enough for competition. With such a testing method in place and a change to the uci’s rule, there could be innovation to excite the next generation of weight weenies.