Comfort
Comfort
Bike manufacturers are working overtime to ensure their bikes make the sportive journey as painless an exercise as possible. Relaxed frame geometry, wider tyres, greater tyre clearances and some effective and quirky frame innovations all make sportive bike development a designer’s dream.
With the sportive boom in full swing, we’ve seen all shapes and sizes of riders hit the roads over the past few years. Sportive riders are not pro riders, and the level of fitness is completely incomparable, from power output all the way down to a rider’s flexibility to reach the handlebars. It can be a long way down to those brake levers if you’re riding the wrong size bike, or indeed the wrong style road bike.
Riders need to be looking for the correct bike to match their physical ability, and also keep in mind how much comfort they’re going to need when in the saddle. There are lots of concessions to comfort on sportive bikes, features like shorter effective top tubes, higher and tapered headtubes, longer and more stable at the wheelbase, all the way down to far more intricate technical details, like the IsoSpeed Decoupler suspension system on Trek’s Domane.
The IsoSpeed Decoupler is basically a pivot between the top tube and seat tube that allows the seat tube to move independently. It means as the bike hits rugged terrain (and the cobbles are a perfect example), the seat tube can move about and diminish the shocks coming through to the rider, which is helpful when you’re trying to maintain a smooth cadence over rough ground.
Adding that flexibility there also means power transfer won’t be affected as the bottom bracket can be as stiff as any other bike.
Specialized, on the other hand, have a different system. Their ‘Zertz’ dampeners have been around for a number of years now, and currently adorn their hugely popular Roubaix, Ruby and Secteur range of bikes. The Zertz inserts are visoelastic dampers in both seatstays and fork arms that release absorbed energy in a different form as the bike hits cobbles, diminishing the effects on the rider.
A completely different approach has been taken by Cannondale, who designed their Synapse frame in two parts: one designed for optimal power transfer and the other for comfort. The bottom bracket is a 73mm wide BB30 that required them to split the seat tube at the bottom end just to accommodate it, and is designed to be as stiff as possible. But they then flattened the profiles of the fork, stays and seat tube (the latter two are called the Save Plus rear triangle) to flex and increase the vertical compliance of the ride. They also redesigned the geometry of the frame, increasing the head tube and chainstay length as well as increasing fork length and this allows for a more upright position on the bike and a longer wheelbase.
The proof that these do make a difference can be seen in the fact that the pros ride endurance bikes at the highest levels of racing. Cannondale-Garmin, for example, have the choice of the SuperSix Evo or the Synapse when they race, but you can be sure the whole team will elect to line up on the Paris-Roubaix start line riding the Synapse.
Away from frame design, the change in attitude towards wider tyres is one obvious thing that has arguably had the greatest impact on rider comfort over the last few years. Once only found on touring bikes and those in the know when it came to the cobbled classics, wider tyres are now fitted across the spectrum of road bikes from the pro peloton downwards.