Leading lights

A great climber’s bike needs to be a lot more than simply lightweight. Cyclist’s expert testers choose their favourites from the current crop

Back in the early 1900s the idea of a bike weighing less than 15kg was a pipe dream. But by the 1960s a skinny steel racer could comfortably hit 10kg, and with a little help from ‘drillium’ – the fad that saw mechanics and riders drill holes in brake levers and chainrings to shave grams – even lighter. Eddy Merckx’s Hour record bike of 1972, built (and drilled) by Ernesto Colnago, weighed just 5.75kg, and even De Rosa’s heart logo was a result of weight saving, with Ugo De

Rosa drilling three holes into a bottom bracket shell then cutting a triangle between them to lose excess material.

Aluminium followed steel, with Italian manufacturer Alan creating the original mass-production aluminium frame, which weighed as little as 1.6kg, in 1972. A few years later titanium joined the party, among the first the 1974 Teledyne Titan whose 2kg frame was a third lighter than comparable steel. And then carbon fibre came along and started chipping away, bike by bike, at weight targets once thought impossible to reach.

The biggest target was the UCI weight limit of 6.8kg, which might have seemed optimistically low when it was introduced in 2000 but is now embarrassingly outdated. As early as 2004 Canyon engineer Hans Christian Smolik created the experimental Projekt 3.7, a 3.7kg, 16-gear bike. In 2006 the Germans were at it again, debuting the Projekt 6.8, a 6.8kg disc brake road bike. In fact weight seems a bit of a theme in Germany, with the record for the lightest rideable bike standing at 2.7kg – a custom project started by German Gunter Mai, then finished off by Jason Woznick of Fairwheel Bikes in Tucson, Arizona.

As for production – ie, not custom – bikes, the feathery crown rests with German brand AX Lightness, whose

Vial Evo Ultra tips the scales at 4.4kg thanks in part to a frame weighing under 600g. Most recently Specialized has hit the headlines with its Aethos (see p13), a sub-6kg fully built racer that the company claims has the lightest disc-frame ever built – just 585g for a size 56cm.

It’s incredible stuff, but there is a big but. When we put together the list of our favourite lightweight bikes it soon became clear that weight wouldn’t actually be the defining factor. Otherwise a bike such as the Tifosi Mons, which stole 15 minutes of fame by dressing up in the most expensive parts and weighing a claimed 4.6kg, would be on the list. Not that it’s a bad bike, but it is an example of how if you throw enough money at a light-ish frame (780g) you can hit crazy-light numbers – 790g AX Lightness tubular wheels anyone? That isn’t really cricket.

No, bike design has come so far that at the top end riders can and should expect a more holistic approach, such that stiffness, comfort and even aerodynamics need not be sacrificed.

Weight matters and it underpins our choices here, but there’s much more to these bikes than meets the scales.