It's All About the Bike

by Robert Penn

  ‘Italians like design, colours, shapes. We care a lot about the aesthetics of the bicycle,’ Lorenzo Taxis said. ‘This is the part of the bicycle you could really say Italy has ownership of. The care in the details, it’s part of the Campagnolo way. We are a product-oriented company. Our products sell at the top of a pyramid of a mature industry. The bicycle has not changed for a long, long time. Only the performance has improved. So the development of all new products is followed by Mr Valentino Campagnolo himself. He believes that if you can bring to the market outstanding products that also look beautiful, then the business takes better care of itself.’

  Campagnolo are today best known for their ‘Gruppi’ or groupsets — a set of components made by the same manufacturer, designed and machined to work together. The first Campagnolo Record ‘gruppo’ was marketed in 1958. Prior to groupsets, quality bicycles were commonly equipped with components cherry-picked from several different manufacturers: brakes by Mafac, crankset by Chater-Lea, pedals by Barelli, and so on. The debate about the pros and cons of the groupset has simmered among cyclists since 1958. The argument in favour is that components are manufactured to work efficiently together, while providing a unitary look to a bicycle. The argument against is that the big component makers have reduced consumer choice and successfully reserved for themselves a larger share of the market.

  At the beginning of this project to put my dream bike together, I vowed to eschew the groupset. I sketched out in my mind a bike with perhaps a Tune chainwheel, Specialités TA cranks, brakes by Ciamillo, a Stronglight chain and Campagnolo derailleurs. When I mentioned the plan to Brian Rourke he winced: he actually physically recoiled, like someone receiving a low-voltage electric shock. When he’d recovered, he carefully made the case for a groupset, or at the very least a drivetrain comprising matching components. The compatibility issue was significant: ‘You could have yourself a right headache, Rob,’ he said. More important to Brian, though, was how the bike looked. It was OK to go off-piste with the hubs and the seat post. Even the brake calipers could be from an alternative manufacturer. But the drivetrain, derailleurs and integrated shifter/brake levers were sacrosanct, on purely aesthetic grounds. Brian had been right on so many other things. I chose to trust him.

  Once the decision to buy a gruppo was made, I knew precisely what I wanted: Campagnolo Record. The first Record gruppo in 1958 comprised a chainset, bottom bracket, hubs, seat post, headset, front and rear derailleurs and pedals. Today, it’s a more refined list: chain, chainset, cassette, front and rear derailleurs, levers and brakes. It’s a hideously expensive kit. For me, it would be a massive indulgence. I’d add to it my own pedals.

  The name Record runs through the entire history of cycle sport in the second half of the twentieth century. The word alone is venerated; it has a touch of ju-ju about it. The Record groupset, through all its different guises and materials, has forged an association with victory that is unparalleled not just in cycling, but in sport. The thirty-six Tour de France victories between 1958 and today and the twenty-six wins in the Giro d’Italia between 1968 and 1994 give some idea how dominant Campagnolo Record componentry has been.

  Like many, I’ve admired and coveted Record components for a long time. When I was 12 years old, a boy in the neighbouring village had a duck-egg blue Peugeot racing bike with a Campy Record groupset. The components were hand-me-downs from his Dad but that boy buffed them up like he’d paid for them with his own blood. The bike was so sumptuous it hurt me just to look at it. Thirty years later I can close my eyes and still see that bike, with its shining drivetrain, against a stone wall, beside the well, outside the churchyard.

  There was no point putting Campy on my round-the-world bike. I went for a Shimano groupset then, in the knowledge that finding replacement components in remote places would be much easier. I’ve waited and waited to drop (a lot) of cash on Campagnolo Record components. My time had come.

  ‘Happy Christmas,’ Lorenzo said, pushing the box across the table. ‘The cardboard weighs more than the components.’ With a few strokes of a Stanley knife, the box was open. Each component was individually packaged. Lorenzo commentated as I began to pull them out: bottom bracket cups — ‘English standard size’; the rear derailleur — ‘So much technology in here’; the crankset — ‘Ah, the sexiest piece of them all. Cranks are 170 mm. Compact chainrings. This is correct for you, yes?’; brakes, integrated shifter/brake levers, cassette — ‘Eleven speed. The best.’ And the chain that would supply the kinetic sound-track to all my future rides.

  It was like being given a box of jewellery. I was overawed. Then I remembered I wasn’t being given it at all. I was buying the gruppo. I winced. It was, as Will, my oldest cycling companion and best man, had said: ‘a classic mid-life crisis purchase’.

  4. The Lateral Truth, So Help Me God

  Wheels

  I’ll ride this here two-wheeled concern right straight away at sight.

  (Banjo Paterson, ‘Mulga Bill’s Bicycle’)

  Gravy was tall, like a Redwood. Even hunched over his bike snaking across the car park, I could tell. ‘Hey, must be Rarb,’ he said, adding ‘arrrb’ to my name in his lolloping Californian accent. He offered me a hand the size of a tennis racket. Then he broke a smile that could span the Golden Gate Bridge: ‘Welcome to Fairfax, Marin County. Thanks for making the trip. Better come on in. See if we can fix you up some Gravy wheels.’

  Everything about Gravy was big — even his reputation. From the beginning of this project, I asked everyone I spoke to: ‘Who builds the best bespoke wheels?’ Many named their local wheel-builder, out of innate loyalty. Some put themselves forward. A few even named rival wheel-builders with whom they’d fallen out long ago. But the deeper I got into the bike world, the more I asked, and the more one name kept coming up: Gravy.

  Flying to the West Coast of America to get a pair of custom wheels made is extravagant by any measure. I simply can’t do that, I first thought, even though I knew I could pick up the headset for my bike on the same trip. What finally swung it was a telephone conversation with Gravy: ‘Awesome if you could make it, man,’ he said. ‘We’ll get you some beautiful wheels, for sure. We’d also get you set up riding down Mount Tam on Repack. That’s where the shop is, right here at the foot of Repack. Maybe Charlie Kelly and Joe Breeze are around. What would you say to riding down Repack with Charlie and Joe?’ I dropped the phone.

  If you’re not a mountain bike fanatic, you wouldn’t know that Repack is the most famous off-road trail in the world. It’s the birthplace of the mountain bike. Here, in the late 1970s, a bunch of hippy bike bums turned the American hillbilly cruiser bike into the all-terrain bicycle — the form of the bicycle that would blaze a technological trail through the late twentieth century. It was the most significant innovation in the design of the bicycle since John Kemp Starley’s Rover Safety. It had huge ramifications: as one bicycle historian wrote: ‘The mountain bike saved the bicycle industry’s butt.’

  The 1974 oil crisis had prompted a boom in bicycle sales in America, the first significant spike since the 1890s. But by the late 1970s, the industry had stuttered to a halt. The mass-market, ten-speed racing bikes had hard tyres and even harder saddles: only experienced cyclists extracted any pleasure from riding them. The machine had unintentionally drifted a long way from the utilitarian, user-friendly ‘people’s nag’ envisaged by Starley.

  What began as a cottage industry in the garages of Marin County slipped, in 1981, into mass production: the Californian company, Specialized, manufactured 500 Stumpjumpers in Japan. They sold out in three weeks. Today, there’s one in the Smithsonian National Museum of American History. The big players in the market, all of whom initially snubbed the ‘ugly bikeling’, took note. It was the beginning of a gold rush that revitalized the industry in America. In just a few years, the mountain bike went global. In 1985, 5 per cent of US bicycle sales were mountain bikes. A decade later, it was 95 per cent. In 1988, 15 per cent of the 2.2 million bicycles sold
in Britain were mountain bikes. By 1990, it was 60 per cent. In 1996, mountain biking became an Olympic sport.

  The new machine touched a nerve. The mountain bike was comfortable to ride. It evoked nostalgia among Americans for a style of bicycle popular in the middle of the twentieth century. It perfectly caught the imagination of the baby boom generation. They all wanted one; suddenly, a practical bike was affordable again.

  If Repack was the birthplace of the mountain bike, then Charlie Kelly and Joe Breeze were the midwives. I’d been reading about them for twenty years. They are legends. The chance to ride Repack with them was too good. I dug out my passport.

  ‘C’mon, Rarb. C’mon on in to my laboratory. Take a look around while I get fixed up,’ Gravy said. The ‘laboratory’ was Gravy’s workshop, tucked away at the back of a cavernous bike shop called the Fairfax Cyclery. The walls were densely packed with memorabilia — signed photos, cycling shirts, over-sized cranks — from Gravy’s thirty-year association with the bicycle. Steve ‘Gravy’ Gravenites grew up in Mill Valley, down the road from Fairfax, when the sport of mountain biking was somewhere between conception and birth. He raced mountain bikes for ten years, followed by a decade on the road (‘visiting all the world’s unknown ski resorts,’ he said) as a leading race mechanic or ‘wrench’. He worked for international mountain bike teams like Yeti, Schwinn and Volvo-Cannondale, as well as for individual national and world champions such as Tinker Juarez, Myles Rockwell and Missy ‘the Missile’ Giove.

  When Gravy reappeared with coffee, I had my head inside his old toolbox or ‘race case’ as he called it. It had been round the world at least ten times and had the stickers to prove it. Common tools were on the top level; the heavy artillery was down below.

  Only Gravy’s wheel-building expertise surpasses his wrenching credentials: ‘Three decades I’ve been building wheels, two for money. I don’t reckon I’ve built ten thousand wheels yet, but I’m gettin’ close,’ he said. Before manufacturers made complete wheelsets in factories, he built wheels for entire mountain bike teams. His philosophy — to tailor the wheel to the weight, height, riding style and riding conditions of each rider.

  You can have a bicycle without derailleur gears or brakes: it’s called a ‘track’ or ‘fixed-wheel’ bike. Track riders have to ride them; regiments of urban cyclists love to. If pressed, you can even have a bicycle without a bottom bracket, sprocket, chain, chainwheel, cranks and pedals. Take away all this and you’ve stripped the bicycle back to the bare essential parts of the Draisine.

  Take away the wheels, though, and you do not have a bicycle. All you have is a wooden bench, or a set of tubes, welded together in an odd shape that’s no good to anyone. Wheels are fundamental. This much is reflected in both the definition of and the etymology of the word — ‘bicycle’. Chambers Twentieth Century Dictionary definition is: ‘a vehicle with two wheels, one before the other, driven by pedals’. ‘Cycle’ comes from the Greek kyklos meaning ‘circle’ or ‘wheel’.

  The machine was not called a ‘bicycle’ from the beginning, though. Words like this grow. They don’t issue, at the touch of an inventor’s hand, from the machine itself, and immediately fit. No, people won’t accept any word. The long list of appellations in English pre-dating ‘bicycle’ includes Draisine, pedestrian-accelerator, dandy-horse, dandy-charger, hobby horse, pedestrian-curricle, boneshaker, velocipede, ordinary and high-wheeler. The term ‘bicycle’, probably coined in France in the late 1860s, first appeared on a British patent in 1869 and was adopted after 1870. As the Flemish novelist Stijn Streuvels wrote, ‘Has any machine ever become so popular, so widespread in so short a time, and have we ever had more difficulty in finding a name for it?’

  Each nation, of course, gave it a name in their language and went through a similar selection process. In Holland, they tried ‘rijwiel’, ‘trapwiel’ and ‘wielspeerd’, before settling on ‘fiets.’ The French took a bit of Greek and a smidge of Latin and bolted them together to form ‘vélocipède’ (‘fast-foot’). The word was too sluggish for something so brisk, so it was shortened to ‘vélo’ and preferred to ‘bicyclette’, ‘bécane’ and ‘bicloune’. Vélo is a good word: if I shut my eyes and let the ‘vvv’ vibrate on my lips, I can summon a sensation of laziness, pedalling along on a summer evening. I also like, again for purely aural reasons, ‘rad’ (German), ‘rothar’ (Irish), and ‘podilato’ (Greek). But the real word, the utilitarian, living word, the word borrowed with slight modifications by dozens of languages and understood by a substantial majority of the world’s population is — ‘bicycle’: two wheels.

  Installed on an orange couch in the window of the bike shop, Gravy carefully took the front and rear hubs that I’d brought with me. They were Royce hubs, manufactured by Cliff Polton in Hampshire, England. I’d been led to Royce by reputation, just as I was to Gravy. Brian Rourke first mentioned them — ‘bombproof,’ he’d said — and then, as when you learn a new word, Royce started to pop up everywhere. I saw the understated ‘R’ laser-etched on to the hubs of hand-built wheels; Polton popped up in magazine articles about the dying days of British engineering excellence; and people who had heard about my project randomly emailed me to extol the beauty of Royce components. Polton made components for Nicole Cooke when she was a junior champion. More famously, he made the hubs for the bike Chris Boardman rode to break the world ‘Athlete’s Hour’ record (the record that must be attempted on a conventional bike with spoked wheels, drop handlebars and round frame tubes, and different from the ‘Absolute Hour’ or ‘Best Human Effort’) at the Manchester Velodrome in October 2000.

  Royce hubs are simple and beautiful. The spindles, machined from aerospace-grade titanium, are guaranteed for the ‘life of the original purchaser’. The aluminium hub shells are CNC machined and expensively finished. In fact, the hubs look like jewellery. I knew I needed to look no further. But there was one hitch: when I rang to place an order, Polton told me he’d sold out of 32-spoke, Campagnolo-compatible rear cassette hubs. No more would be made for several weeks (he was on a beekeeping course), and certainly not before my trip to California. But he did have a 28-spoke, Campag-compatible rear hub. What did I weigh? What was the bike for? ‘Oh, you’ll be fine with that,’ Polton said.

  Gravy inspected the hubs at close range, over the top of his glasses, like a gem dealer eyeing diamonds:

  I’m noticing titanium axle, medium flange width, beautiful machine work going on here, nice chamfer . . . no holes or nasty edges that might crack in the future, a real nice high polish that seals the metal. Titanium freehub body on the rear hub, much stronger than aluminium, that’s good. The bearings feel super smooth. Great set-up. These should last you a long, long time, Rarb. This’ll be the first pair of Royce hubs I’ve ever built up. Awesome. Now, what tyres are you planning on running on this machine?

  I already had the tyres: they were Continental Grand Prix 4000s. I’d been to the factory to see them made a few weeks earlier. I chose Continental simply because they had never let me down. Riding round the world, I always tried to run two Continental Town and Country tyres on Mannanan. In extremis, I’d settle for one on the rear. They were the toughest tyres by, well, a town and country mile.

  The small, medieval town of Korbach in central Germany is dominated by the factory (located on Continental Street) in the way towns in Lancashire were by mills in Victorian times. A vast red-brick chimney rises to meet the sky. On the morning I arrived, a Stygian grey haze hung over the buildings. The air was cold. The factory was dark. I felt like I’d walked into a scene from a Sherlock Holmes novel: not inappropriately — Arthur Conan Doyle was a keen cyclist and Holmes boasted of being able to identify ‘forty-two different impressions left by tyres’.

  The sunshine piercing the gloom came in the shape of Hardy Bölts, my guide for the day. Straight-backed, tall, lean and tanned, he was another specimen exemplifying the physical benefits of life spent on a bicycle. Hardy had raced as a pro, both on the road and the mountain, before joining
Continental. Flashing a fine set of white teeth, he clasped my hand and swished his ID card to open the gates.

  ‘You know the nickname for Korbach?’ he said. ‘Rubber Town. And how about that smell, the smell of heated rubber? It never goes away. Like a bicycle saddle, you get used to it after a while.’

  The people of Korbach have had long enough to get used to it. Continental, now one of the largest global suppliers to the automotive industry, employing 150,000 people in eighteen countries, began making bicycle tyres in Korbach in 1892. It’s a manufacturing record that spans almost the entire history of the pneumatic tyre.

  John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish veterinary surgeon resident in Belfast, invented the pneumatic tyre in 1888. A doctor had advised cycling for the health of his 9-year-old son, remarking that the activity would be all the more beneficial if the jarring from the rough granite cobbles on the city streets could be reduced.

  No doubt the entire cycling population would have then concurred. Comfort was something no one expected or sought from cycling. During the boom in velocipedes — known with good reason as ‘boneshakers’ — tyres were made of solid iron. By the time the Rover Safety bicycle was introduced in 1885, tyres were made of solid rubber strips and tacked or glued to the wheel rim. It was an improvement on iron; even so, a simple bike ride could still rattle a man’s molars free.

  Dunlop tacked sleeves of linen to the wooden wheels of his son’s tricycle and inserted crude, inflatable rubber tubes with a non-return valve and filled them with compressed air. It was like having a flexible cushion strapped to the wheel. It worked. Dunlop christened the word ‘pneumatic’, patented the idea and began small-scale production in Dublin. The first advertisement appeared in the Irish Cyclist in December 1888: ‘Look out for the new Pneumatic Safety (bicycle). Vibration impossible.’