WHEN WE’RE LOOKING at new bikes, we cyclists love to immerse ourselves in numbers. We fixate on weight, aerodynamic drag, millimetres of suspension travel, and millimetres of deflection. We ponder tyre width, rim depth, and rim width. We obsess over geometry tables, scrutinising the head-tube angles, seat-tube angles, chainstay lengths.
It makes us informed. It makes us confident we’re buying the right bike.
But there’s one big problem:
A bike is not a number. It is not a dimension, or a measurement. Lightest, stiffest, slackest – these numerical superlatives, quantified in labs and wind tunnels to degrees accurate beyond human perception, are meaningless on their own. Since 1995, I’ve ridden almost every bike that’s claimed to be, at the moment, the -est of something. And not one of these bikes…