Bike Demo Part: 1

I would like to start this off by responding, to two comments posted on Friday by Libertyonbikes! regarding the nature of the demo and it's intent.

1. " 'is this a game of one upmanship?' i mean snob got a performance single speed," - For one I could never possibly one up bikesnob in anyway with regards to blogging. The man is infinitely more skilled in the craft of writing, than I could ever conceivably be. I also seem to have lost the ability to tell if things are spelled wrong, especially if they are not underlined in red. (homonyms I hate you!) It has also occurred to me that the blogger spell checker apparently sucks.

2. "now by demoing i hope you won't be 'rocking' or 'sporting' a team kit of any nature." Well you, know I wasn't planning on it. But since you pointed it out, I decided to pick up a Campagnolo racing jersey last minute (plus it was really, really hot and I needed a short sleeve jersey). Since I was testing out Campy 11sp and Bora Ultra twos, while wearing a Campy jersey I wanted to go with the fully sincere roadie look. I firmly believe to pull of deep section carbon tublar wheels, you have to be wearing shoe covers. No matter how hot it is out. If you have enough self importance to ride on areo wheels with tubular tires, than wear the damn areo booties. Or ells you might end up looking like a triathlete .

Now for the test. I wanted to get a really good feel for the bike by using it for its intended purpose, but I don' race. So instead I used to the same thing that most of the people who own one of these kind of bikes do, get coffee. I left from Laguna Beach and headed up the coast to New Port. Like Snob I wanted a sort of cultural litmus test, where I could observe other peoples reactions to it and perhaps more accurately measure its inherent awesomeness.
Beyond watching people look at me with a condensing air of jealously all day, I also wanted to know how the bike rode. On top of that I wanted to get a good feel for 11sp, which I had yet to really warm up to.

The Ride: I started out on flat ground, and spun up to a comfortable cadence. I fired off some rear shifts, they seemed to work fine. Next I engaged the front shifter, articulated by a quick short throw followed by an immediate shift which brought me up into the big ring. I started spinning a little bit faster, and quickly came to the realization that this bike is indeed ridiculously fast. Its also expectedly very stiff, the wheels and the frame do some to endow it with some qualities of vibration dampening, but overall it's not nearly as forgiving as my road bike. But the actual feeling of ridding this bike is difficult to quantify perhaps somewhere right between awesome and totally bad ass. While riding this bike it also impossible to resift the urge to overtake other bikers, who you might encounter out of the road, at speed which makes them seem as if they are not moving. All while ridding in the tuck position and rocking out

However this bike is not without flaw, when you begin to encounter any slightly moderate incline all of its magical speed disappears. If you try to take on anything steep, the bike becomes painfully slow and you will begin cursing the deep section wheels as they spin slowly up with hill. Point blank this bike sucks for climbing.

But I mostly expected that as well, and I still had not answered the question I really wanted to know. How good is this bike for getting coffee...