What makes a bike ride good?
Is it the frame materials? The geometry? The fit? The tires? The components? Whether or not the rider has had a satisfactory bowel movement?
The answer to each one of these questions is probably “Yes,” though to what extent each one contributes to the ride is difficult to quantify, which is particularly frustrating in the case of this bike:
Basically, the bike rides the way a marketing department would tell you a bike made from titanium and crabon is supposed to ride–let’s call it smooth and springy–but as a curmudgeon who’s inherently skeptical of marketing I’m not comfortable attributing this to the frame material. Like, maybe it’s also the seatpost, or even those wheels, which do seem to deflect laterally when you push them with your thumb, or simply the fact that the bike is extremely light–probably the lightest bike I’ve ever had, except possibly for that plastic Specialized I was riding during my comeback:
Really, the only way to tell how much the frame materials contribute to the ride quality would be to get, say, a steel LeMond frame in exactly the same size, build it up with exactly the same parts, and ride them one after the other:
Actually that’s not a bad idea…
But pending that, the simplest thing to do would be to change the wheels and see what kind of difference that makes. Of course the easy thing would be to just grab a pair of wheels I already have, but I was persuing the List of Craig yesterday when I came across these babies:
I never actually owned a pair of Spinergy Rev-X wheels, but I did have a rear on long-term loan from the shop when they had to send my Cosmic back to the diminutive Frenchmen at Mavic:
Now, granted, this has to have been well over 20 years ago now, but my recollection is that the Spinergy noticeably detracted from the ride quality of the bike, despite the fact that I thought having a Rev-X in the rear and a Cosmic in the front looked totally badass. And if one Spinergy could make a bike ride appreciably worse, then logically two of them could make a bike ride, uh, twice as worse. So it seemed to me that putting a pair on the Tete de Course and seeing if the titanium and crabon could overcome their awfulness would be a good test, whilst simultaneously allowing us all to laugh at their dated hideousness.
The only problem was that there was no way I was paying $200 for a pair of Spinergy Rev-X wheels in 2024. However, in the age of tubeless wide tires and disc brakes, I figured nobody else was either. Furthermore, according to the post, the seller had given up riding and these things were now just sitting in his garage, so I suspected maybe he’d be willing to entertain offers below his asking price. So, politely, I proffered what we in the industry call a “lowball:”
To which he immediately replied:
Hey, I get it. I’ve sold things on Craigslist too. When you list a bike for a reasonable price and you get an email from someone offering $19 and a MetroCard with half a subway fare on it you get annoyed. Nevertheless, a hundred bucks is a hundred bucks, and it’s amusing to think that this person who doesn’t even ride anymore is blithely turning down offers of cold hard cash because he thinks he’s sitting on a gold mine and not a pair of meat slicers that are so deeply and profoundly obsolete that even the fixie kids middle-agers aren’t riding them anymore:
Then again, clearly he’s not the only one:
Now that’s crazy. It doesn’t even come with the original pie plate!
Though I do think it has the little adhesive stiffeners Spinergy was pushing for awhile:
Those things were hilarious, they were like Breathe Right strips for your wheel.
Anyway, to be honest I’m glad he refused my offer, because even spending $100 for those things seems wrong, even if they were once ridden by Mario Cipollini himself:
In 2016, Fran Ventoso claimed he was sliced open by a disc brake rotor, but long before that there was the story of how a Spinergy Rev-X almost sliced off Michele Bartoli’s kneecap:
Eventually the UCI banned the Rev-X, and designer Raphael Schlanger went on to create an even uglier wheel, the Topolino:
Without taking the time to actually verify any of this this, my recollection is that the Topolino featured Kevlar or Kevlar-like spokes that threaded all the way through the hub and across the wheel, so the axle was effectively suspended in a net, but I may be getting that wrong.
Schlanger still designs furniture and lighting under the Topolino name:
Though it’s a goddamn shame he doesn’t offer a table made out of a Spinergy Rev-X.
Speaking of design, in a fit of Spinergy and Cipollini-induced nostalgia, I decided to curate a little tribute to All Hail The Black Market:
And here’s how it came out:
I then stuck it on the Faggin:
You know what this bike could really use? A pair of Spinergys:
Now that would be totally badass.