On 7 Jan., 23:48, Ron wrote:

Yes, this is high amount of stiffness , I suppose. The interesting
thing to note is that very expensive, German bikes are being rated
most favorably. This coming from a German test magazine makes you
wonder what the real intent is behind the initiatives.

I don't think it is a just matter of national preferences that German
bicycles do well in German bike magazine tests ; Germans and
Scandinavians are on average just built bigger than Italians, so many
Germans found standard Italian frames too flexy for their liking. This
created a demand for frames with stiffer bottom bracket areas, so
German frame makers started to produce stiffer frames. This again made
bicycle magazines test the stiffness of the frame, reinforcing the
ideal, that a good bike had a high BB stiffness. Since the German bike
market is heavily influenced by systematic tests from leading bicycle
magazine, this again made the German frame makers make ever increasing
stiffer frames (or have the highest stiffness to weight ratio) in
order to well in these tests. So it really isn't so surprising that
German bikes do well in frame stiffness tests.

When Jens Voight joined team CSC he found the Cervelo frames way too
soft and asked for, surprise, much higher BB-stiffness. They seem to
have listened, because Cervelo bikes now have a very high BB-stiffness-
to-weight ratio. The Cervelo R3 SL won the German Tour Magazine mega
carbon bike test in 2008, http://www.cervelo.com/reviews/Tour_Cover.jpg
not because it is German, not because it is Canadian, but because it
it has properties that the German bike market (and therefore Tour
Magazine) appreciate; high BB-stiffness while still being comfortable
etc.

--
Regards