On Jan 8, 12:09*pm, Lou Holtman wrote:
Op 8-1-2010 4:14, Peter S. schreef:





On 7 Jan., 23:48, *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

Agreed. German Bicycle magazine (TOUR eg) have an opinion what they
think is important in a frame. They are very open in how they test and
how they rate the different properties of a frame/bike. German bicycle
manufacturers try to comply to that. If you don't agree with that no
problem by all means buy a 'mysterious' Italian bike like Pinarello,
DeRosa, Colnago or Wlllier but you have to pay 2000-3000 euro more for
those. If you look at the 'winner' of the test the Canyon CF SLX ETE201
it costs 6000 euro. Although a lot of money but compared to A brand
Italian bike with comparable specs a hell of a deal. The frameset of the
Canyon costs 1800 euro (if you have a license 1500 euro) including fork,
headset, stem and seatpost. Almost half the price of the Pinarello
Prince, DeRosa King or Colnago CX1 framesets.
The Germans understand that and Canyon, Red Bull, Stevens, Cube etc are
very succesfull.

Lou

The Germans and the Dutch have a talent for doing the job right. -- AJ