Well, vacation is now just a memory, and it’s great to be back at the edge of the city in a landscape blighted by lousy drivers in fraudulently-registered vehicles and strewn with discarded Citi Bikes:
It’s always a little bit hard to come back to New York City. (Even though the photo above is actually Yonkers.) When pressed about why we live here, New Yorkers generally cite all the “culture” we don’t take part in and then ultimately fall back on the restaurants, which is the New York City version of Stockholm Syndrome. Plus, the restaurants are now just making the city even worse, since you can’t get anywhere without having to dodge food delivery people on motorscooters.
“So which bike did you bring with you on your vacation?,” you’re probably not wondering. Well, the terrain up there calls for decent tire clearance and wide-range gearing, and in years past standout performers have included the Milwaukee, the Jones, and the A. Homer Hilsen. However, this year after much deliberation I made a wildly impetuous last-second decision to bring a bicycle with none of those attributes. Instead, having noted its resemblance to the Starfleet insignia from Star Trek, I went with George Plimpton’s Y-Foil, a.k.a. The Charity Ride Destroyer, almost entirely for a single photo-op:
That is the Star Trek Original Series Set Tour in Ticonderoga, NY–and yes, William Shatner will indeed be appearing there in November:
I should point out that William Shatner is 93 years old, so the fact that he’s still willing and able to travel all the way to Ticonderoga of all places to entertain his fans is deeply impressive. While I’m not a Trekkie myself, even I’m tempted to return for the event, if only to get the Y-Foil signed. Sure, George Plimpton’s Y-Foil may be special, but George Plimpton’s Y-Foil signed by Admiral James T. Kirk would be nothing short of a priceless artifact.
But there’s also another reason I brought the Y-Foil. As a short-lived bike with a polarizing design the Y-Foil is something of a “cult bike,” as well as a blank canvas upon which bike nerds of all stripes have projected various expressions of dorkiness:
But while I always thought of it as just an aero bike for people with Tridork tendencies…
…I recently learned it was designed to accept a suspension fork, and ancient forum threads indicate that it was in fact specifically developed for Paris-Roubaix:
No. The last time Trek had a bike disqualified for Paris Roubaix, it cost them a fortune. The Y-Foil (Y66 & Y77) models were designed from the get-go to be a Paris Roubaix bike, with a taller standard fork that you could substitute a Rockshox Ruby suspension fork for, without changing the geometry.
So if the Y-Foil was actually meant to be a cobble-killer then I and many others have had this bike completely wrong all these years. This I thought could be a fun subject for a new Outside column, and I’ve even got a call set up with a former Trek engineer who worked on the bike to learn more. In the meantime though I figured I should see how it handles Vermont gravel:
I’ll save the rest for the Outside column, which will probably be the first time any mainstream lifestyle publication has mentioned the Y-Foil since 1997, when it made the cover of Bicycling’s Editors’ Choice issue:
All I could find was the cover, but I bet they didn’t test it on gravel because in 1997 riding bicycles on gravel hadn’t been invented yet. Clearly though they were so dazzled by the bike’s radical shape and golden hue that they didn’t even notice it was in the small-small combo. I suppose it would be similarly easy not to notice a shapely bikini model has spinach in her teeth while shooting the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue.
Also like thongs, there has long been prurient interest in bikes without seat tubes. Consider the curiously named “Flying Gate”…
…which evidently you can still buy:
Or how about an artisanal Y-Foil made from titanium?
And if you’ve given up on the idea of ever uncrossing your eyes again there’s always the RoundTail™:
It will liberate you from the tyranny of the triangle:
With conventional diamond geometry, jarring vibrations are channeled directly to the rider’s spine. For any rider in any discipline, comfort matters, which is why bike companies have spent millions developing composites to deliver a more comfortable ride. But they have been stuck for decades, enslaved to the concept of a triangle.
Here’s more from the inventor:
Like the Y-Foil, the RoundTail is designed to provide additional comfort by introducing a little vertical flex in the rear–and also like the Y-Foil it harkens back to a time before it occurred to anybody that an easier way of doing that would be to design a bike that allowed for slightly larger tires. Note how nobody here is on tires wider than 25mm, including those riders of ample frame:
Speaking of wide tires, I didn’t only bring the Y-Foil with me:
I may be crazy, but I’m not stupid.