Innehållsförteckning för Issue 25 från Cyclist Australia

S ize certainly isn’t everything when it comes to Taiwan. Small enough to be easily explored over a week or two, Taiwan’s location on the Pacific Rim, right at the edge of the tropics, means it is blessed with a spectacular range of natural assets. Take your pick from majestic mountains, sweeping turquoise coastlines, challenging hiking and running trails, and amazing wildlife such as the blue magpie and endangered Formosan black bear. Popularly known as “Formosa”, which means beautiful – a name bestowed by Portuguese explorers in the 16th century – Taiwan is a hidden travel gem. Don’t wait for the stars to align before exploring it! Hiking the Taroko Gorge Easily experienced as a day trip from Taipei, the 18km marble-walled Taroko Gorge is one of Asia’s best natural…

$289, met-helmets.com M ET claims that at a wind speed of 50kmh, the Manta saves 10 watts over other semi-aero competitors. We can’t confirm that, but it certainly looks as sleek and slippery as the sea creature it’s named after. It has hardly any vents, but the few there are have been placed for best effect so cooling shouldn’t be an issue, and at 218g there won’t be any problems with weight either. 100% Speedcraft SL sunglasses $249.95, ride100percent.com Optics specialist 100% is best known for its motocross goggles, but it recently branched into performance eyewear too. The Speedcraft is its signature design, looking more than a little reminiscent of Oakley’s iconic Eyeshade to make for an interesting competitor to the latter’s current Jawbreaker line. The Speedcrafts use a grime-resistant…

A ero frames and wheels are designed to optimise the slipperiness of your bike through the air. Trouble is, the air doesn’t know that. It keeps changing in speed and direction relative to you on your bike, which means one significant factor of aerodynamics is rarely stable for very long – the yaw angle. Yet manufacturers say they’ve optimised their products for specific ranges of yaw angles, with some even claiming to have created tube and rim shapes that act like sails, driving the bike forward when the wind hits it from the correct angle. But with the speed and direction of both wind and rider being infinitely variable, how can there be an ‘optimal’ yaw angle, and more importantly, what is it? First, let’s understand yaw. Imagine tying a…

I t’ll seal. Just give it a minute. The tear isn’t that big,’ explains an overzealous Dan, failing in his attempt to shield the wounded tyre from view. ‘Are you sure? There’s sealant everywhere and we have plenty of extra tubes. Let’s just throw a tube in,’ I protest. Dan reaches for his jersey pocket and removes another C02 canister – we’ve got two between us – in a futile attempt to re-inflate the wheezing tyre and save himself from getting covered in more tubeless sealant. I get it. It’s messy work. I throw a tube his way and it lands in his reluctant hands. But there’s no real rush. We might be two hours from being done and dusted, but the late season spring sun is high in the…

Y ou don’t just invent bicycle races. They take years of planning and decades of execution. Races become tales and tales become legends. For a bicycle race to enter the calendar is one thing; to cement itself in the velocipedic vernacular quite another. Yet that’s exactly what the Strade Bianche has done in less than a decade. Or has it? Although it might seem counterintuitive in the age of amateur spin-offs from professional events, the Gran Fondo Strade Bianche, whose starting gun I now anxiously await, is actually the parent of the pro race, a 1.HC category race that started in 2007 and has since become one of the early-season cherries. The gran fondo predates the pro event by 10 years, and over the course of time morphed into two…

B ikes are a lot like the universe. In the beginning there was just Karl von Drais and his self-propelled Laufmaschine dream, surrounded by a sea of infinite darkness. Time ticked past until one day, boom!, race bikes, sportive bikes, aero bikes, disc bikes, gravel bikes, all the bikes exploded onto the scene. What happens next is as unknown to us as the universe’s progress is to science. The S-Works Venge ViAS Disc, a futuristic rocket of a bike made by scientists with lots of letters after their names, sits at one end of the racing spectrum, while the Cervélo C5 hopes the industry contracts to the point where one bike does it all. What matters, however, is the quality of the ride, and that’s too complex to appraise by…

Buderim 9 is an annual charity ride on the hardest hills of Buderim, on Queensland’s Sunshine Coast. It’s assembled on the last Sunday before Christmas in the sultry Queensland heat. The ride includes breathtaking views, exhilarating descents and vocal crowds. But for the riders, the focus has to be on the nine hills, 1,760 metres of climbing, 74km distance and the three-hour time limit. In 2016, 230 riders participated and only 140 completed the nine hills within the time limit. This is a tough ride. The pre-ride brief is filled with beautiful dawn light and the collective nervous energy of the riders. The ride starts at the bottom of hill one, at 5am sharp. The start is a quiet affair, with riders politely bustling to find their position and hopefully…

Welcome to the latest issue of Cyclist magazine A s part of our job here at Cyclist, we spend quite a lot of time scouring Australia – and the globe – for great places to ride. Sadly, this rarely (okay, never) involves a private jet and a series of five-star hotels. It usually means hours on Google Maps, dutifully flicking between Street and Map Views, scanning road systems for the tell-tale curves that might reveal a previously undiscovered climb, or clicking our way down tiny lanes to see if they go somewhere cool. Not that we’re complaining – as bike nerds, we find the whole process pretty fun. Give it a go with our Big Rides from this issue: Canberra’s Centenary Trail (page 48) twists and turns around the capital…

$1,695 (incl. carbon crankset, excl. chainrings); $1,099 (spider only); quarq.com T he DZero (or D0) experiment is an intense search by the world’s leading scientists, using the Tevatron particle collider, into subatomic clues that reveal the character of the building blocks of matter. Quarq’s engineers obviously watch too much Big Bang Theory, because that was the inspiration for the name of its new power meter. It’s the fourth generation from a company that started making power meters just 10 years ago. As you’d expect, there are several improvements – more than 150 according to Quarq – but that’s entirely believable given the fast-moving pace of electronics. Most are driven towards increasing accuracy, but also improving reliability, battery life and durability. Bluetooth low energy data transfer is a new addition too…

In 2010, following a gold medal from the Commonwealth Games road race in Delhi just seven days after taking bronze at the UCI Road World Championships in Geelong, the future looked bright for Allan Davis, the Australian cycling standout affectionately known as ‘Alby’ to those in the industry. However, Davis’ star would never again shine quite as brightly as it did that October nearly seven years ago. He would only add a few more highlights to his palmarés, and collect but a smattering of top-10 finishes, including a ninth place finish at the 2011 Tour Down Under – a race he won two years earlier – and a sixth at the road worlds in Limburg in 2012. Just two years later, after spending half a decade with WorldTour teams QuickStep…

It’s something of an inside joke for the motorsport community that most racing drivers are just frustrated cyclists, donning the lycra at any opportunity and stopping off for a coffee before the long ride home. And while Australian Formula 1 driver Daniel Ricciardo may not be eyeing a future Tour berth, he regularly enjoys switching from four wheels to two. ‘I think cycling is great. I’ve always liked bikes – motorbikes or push-bikes,’ says Ricciardo, named Autosport magazine’s number one racing driver for 2016. ‘As a kid I was riding BMX on the weekends with my friends. Especially as a kid, you don’t have your licence, and the easiest way to explore is to get out on a bike. You could cover distance quite quickly, and it was always an…

I t’s hard to know when aero road bikes really became a thing, but in the melting pot stoked up by the Cervélo Soloist in 2001, one bike stands out: the S-Works Venge. Created in partnership with McLaren Applied Technologies, the original Venge was said to save 23 watts at 45kmh, or to open up a gap of three metres over a 200m sprint contested at 70kmh. Since then every aero bike worth its 3:1 tube ratios has come with a beguiling list of figures to give it credence. So, for those in such digits’ thrall, here are the new Venge’s numbers: 116 seconds faster than your average road bike over 40km at a wind speed of 40kmh, of which – according to Specialized’s aerodynamics engineer, Cameron Piper – ‘16…

$495, suplest.com.au M anufacturing quality cycling shoes is usually the preserve of third-generation Italian artisans, able to size up feet at a glance and push cobblers’ nails in with their thumbs. Which is what makes Suplest so interesting – it’s Swiss and relatively young. It does have pedigree, however. ‘My best friend Robert Gehrig and I started Suplest in 2007,’ says co-founder Daniel Balmer. ‘Robert is a designer and I used to work at BMC as road product manager. My father also had a company that did R&D for sport shoe brands, so I was able to profit from his knowhow and contacts. This is what motivated us to do cycling shoes.’ Not yet a decade on, Suplest has a small but perfectly formed range of four road shoes, with…

I n cycling photography, it’s not often you have a chance to shoot the same spot on more than one occasion. You normally get one shot, one opportunity to capture things correctly as the peloton comes blazing by. But on stage 5 of the Tour Down Under, the riders climb Willunga Hill twice. This particular race, the opening round of the WorldTour and the biggest to hit our shores, actually gives us photogs a somewhat easier-than-normal ride, using circuits on a number of stages. And a great shot on Willunga trumps all. This year, for the first pass, I scoured the road looking for an interesting viewpoint. I’ve been to the TDU a few times now, and just when I thought I’d seen it all, a tree with its branches…

T he Casse Déserte, says double Tour de France champion Bernard Thévenet, can only really be compared to the ‘moonscape’ of Mont Ventoux. The vast, middle section of the southern route up the Col d’Izoard marks it out as quite a different beast to the other big climbs in the Alps. Most of them boast a lush, green, summer covering – picture the Heidi hills of just across the border in Switzerland. The Izoard, however, and the Casse Déserte in particular, bring something very special to the table. ‘It’s wild and empty,’ Thévenet tells Cyclist. ‘There’s nothing there – barely a plant or a tree among the rocks. And when you see photos of it in the newspapers or cycling magazines, it’s stunning. For photographers at the Tour, there’s nothing…

A bout 45km west of my front door stands a modest alp. There are no chalets along its flanks, no whistling marmots in its meadows and no snowy peaks. But there is a proper switchback – a real zig followed by a genuine zag. The hill is a 1.6km-long category 4 climb, according to Strava. It’s not the longest or spikiest hill by any means, but it is a superb benchmark for a mission to see how far I can improve my climbing ability... within one month. Every summer, for as long as I can remember, I’ve arrived at the start line of a serious event wondering whether I’ve done enough to actually make it to the finish. I want this year to be different. I want to laugh in…

T he Mallorcans call the Cap de Formentor the meeting point of the four winds. Sitting on the most northerly tip of the biggest of the Balearic Islands, the winds that blow from the Spanish mainland, the European Alps, the Atlantic Ocean and North Africa meet here, and each seems to have left an impression on this tiny outpost. With alpine-esque hairpins overlooking a crystal blue Mediterranean Sea, beating against a shore of jagged limestone rock, it’s no wonder that the road to Formentor has become an icon of European cycling. While Formentor may be today’s destination, it’s only one piece in Mallorca’s astounding repertoire of climbs. Indeed, at times the island feels like a custom-built theme park for cyclists, with dinner conversation animated by excited discussion of which ride…

I t was a year ago when the Cervélo C5 broke cover, and it proved to be a bit of a shock. The Canadian brand with a historical laser focus on performance and aerodynamic speed teetered away from road and into the nebulous region of a slack endurance ride with off-road persuasions. This is far more than another addition to the new genre of ‘gravel’ bicycles, however. This, in fact, is Cervélo’s attempt to rethink how a bike should be made for endurance riding. In a similar vein to the bikes that sit squarely in the gravel sector, the C5 boasts a slightly altered geometry to a normal endurance ride coupled with wider tyre clearance and disc brakes. The C5 was Cervélo’s second leap into discs for the road, following…