Table of contents for April 2017 in Cyclist

£349.99, gopro.com GoPro has become a virtual proprietary eponym, akin to Hoover, Kleenex and Jiffy Bag (insert Team Sky joke here). However, in recent years a slew of other manufacturers have attempted to burst the action-cam’s bubble – and this is GoPro’s reply. ‘The list of improvements is long,’ says GoPro’s Isabel Pakowski. ‘The most prominent one is probably the LCD touchscreen on the back, which is now part of the Hero5, not just an add-on. Then we made it fully waterproof down to 10m, even outside its housing. It can now be voice controlled, has cloud connectivity and additional capture modes too.’ Those modes include improved wide-angle video and photo, GPS tagging, on-screen exposure control, stereo audio, enhanced video stabilisation… the list goes on. It’s almost overwhelming, but Pakowski…

It’s well known that interval training – where you break up a session with high-intensity bursts followed by periods of recovery – is a great way to build fitness. The beauty is that the variations are virtually limitless, but that can also make it hard to know what works best. So is one type of interval better than another? ‘Yes and no,’ says British Cycling coach Will Newton, helpfully. But he has a point. ‘What you do has to be specific to you as an athlete. So if you’re a long-distance time-triallist you need to do long intervals at the pace you race at. Those intervals won’t work if you’re doing a one-hour circuit race.’ Paul Butler, founder of PB Cycle Coaching, agrees, but adds, ‘If one of my clients…

A road that finishes at the summit of a mountain is a climb to nowhere – a fruitless task. While a great mountain pass is a journey into new lands as reward for the effort, a summit road is nothing but a dead end – a one-way journey to suffering. Perhaps of all the activities that we relish in, this might be the most perplexing to a non-cyclist. A mountaintop finish, though, boils cycling down to one of its most basic historic core principles – a battle with a climb. Nowhere in Europe is there a better road with which to wage that battle than on the Pico del Veleta in the Sierra Nevada mountain range in the southern Spanish region of Andalucia. At 3,354m high, with a mighty 2,600m…

If ever there was a bike to do it all, it isn’t this one. But if ever there was one to put a guaranteed smile on your face, it is the Venge. From standing starts to 40kmh-plus, everything about the bike is fast and, coupled with quick handling and an aggressive position, there’s little about this bike I don’t like. Sram’s eTap and Quarq power meter are technical joys to behold – precise, intuitive and suffering no ill consequences in the wet, even if they do contribute substantially to the hefty pricetag. Admittedly with the hidden hoses and integrated cockpit the Venge is a fiddle to service, and it will bounce you around a bit on rougher roads, but the flipside is an ultra-clean aesthetic and…

One October day in 1969, late in the evening, Bob Gore took out his professional frustration on an unsuspecting length of polytetrafluoroethylene (or PTFE as it’s better known). Having spent fruitless months trying to stretch the material without it snapping, as the story goes, Gore gave a heated rod of PTFE an angry, forceful tug. To his amazement it stretched tenfold in length, and in those few seconds he had changed its already miraculous qualities dramatically. It was the birth of a new material called ePTFE (‘e’ meaning ‘expanded’), which became Gore-Tex, and which has been keeping cyclists dry for decades. I’m standing in a 10m tall glass chamber, and several tonnes of water are about to come crashing down onto me to reinforce how effective that 50-year-old experiment is…

MERCIER ‘Do you know how much I paid for that Mercier? It’ll make you cry. £200. It’s all original Shimano 600 [the precursor to Ultegra]. It rides really well because of the tubulars. I’ve always found if you keep the tubs in good condition then you don’t have many problems. It’s not totally perfect – I think it has been resprayed at some point as the pink doesn’t look quite perfect to me.’ ATOM ‘I was with a friend of mine who lives in France, and we were having a few glasses of wine, as you do, and he says, “Come upstairs, Richard, I’ve got some bikes I’m thinking of selling.” Anyway, I ended up buying four bikes off him and this was one of them. ‘The Atom is one…

THE SPEC Model Bastion Road Disc Groupset Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 9070 Deviations Shimano BR-RS805 hydraulic disc brakes, Shimano RT-99 140mm IceTech rotors, Shimano ST-R785 shifters Wheels DT Swiss ERC 1100 DiCut Finishing kit 3T Ergosum Team Stealth handlebar, 3T Arx II Team Stealth stem, Brooks England Cambium C13 saddle Weight 7.56kg Price £5,800 frameset, £11,000 complete Contact veloatelier.co.uk If any bike comes close to being a fantasy made real, it’s the Bastion Road Disc. Designed by a team of ex-automotive engineers, it ticks all the boxes for a modern road bike – wide tyre clearance, disc brakes, integrated cabling – but then goes much further. The Bastion uses 3D-printed titanium lugs, filament-wound carbon tubes and a computer-optimised design offering bespoke geometry and stiffness levels tuned to your preference.…

£230, mavic.com Tnspired by La Course au Soleil – the race to the sun – you’d probably want to keep these arty, limited-edition Paris-Nice shoes for clean, sunny days, as it would be a real shame to get them dirty. Look closely and you’ll see all kinds of pictorial references to the bike race, from a weenie Eiffel Tower to palm trees, and many more besides. We couldn’t find Wally, though (or ‘Charlie’ as the French call him). The design looks like it was something lifted straight off the doodle pad next to the phone in Mavic’s footwear design office, but it might well spark a new trend for creative shoe endeavours. Beneath the frenzied exterior graphics lies a top-level race shoe – Mavic’s Cosmic Pro platform – with Energy…

£79.99, madison.co.uk Scrubbing a grimy chain with an old toothbrush is like cleaning your teeth with a cotton bud – the exterior might appear dirt-free, but for a spotless drivetrain (and mouth) it’s getting to the bits you can’t see that counts. A chain-cleaning device will achieve a good-as-new chain in seconds, saving you a fortune in drivetrain wear. And this professional model from Park Tool is the daddy of chain cleaners. Constructed from cast aluminium, with the working parts fully replaceable, it will likely outlive you no matter how fastidious you are about buffing your chain links.…

Cyclist: Tao, you rode for Sky as a stagiaire in 2015 but a full-time contract didn’t materialise until now. How come? TAO GEOGHEGAN HART: There was strong interest from the team but I wanted another year at under-23s. Why? The most polite way of putting it is that I didn’t win a race in 2015 and felt that was something I had to do before turning professional. That said, my final year with Axel [Merckx’s UCI Continental team Axeon Hagens Berman] also provided me with opportunities to race at the highest level, competing at the Tour of California [where he finished as second-best young rider] and the Tour of Britain. It proved a great learning curve. Cyc: Did it feel strange when you first started racing in the…

Every year in Norway there’s a race from Geirangerfjord up a mountain called the Dalsnibba,’ says Talbot Frameworks’ founder, owner and framebuilder Matt McDonough. ‘I visit the area a lot because we have some family friends there, and I’ve ridden up the mountain numerous times. It’s stunning, and it’s what this bike is named after.’ It’s a long way from McDonough’s workshop in south London to the easterly fjords of Norway, but the spirit of the mountain is manifest in the Dalsnibba, a lightweight, super-stiff climbing machine. ‘This is the first mixed materials bike I ever made – a prototype, if you like,’ he says. ‘I started building lugged frames, then fillet brazed, and now most of our work is TIG. This is fillet brazed, though, as you get that…

1 TOKEN THREAD FIT 7- IN-1 BB £89.99, i-ride.co.uk Making a business out of selling perfumes of everyday smells will never work – it’s just common scents. But going into the bottom bracket market? Well, it’s working for Token, whose universal BB pledges to quieten noisy pressfit bottom brackets by way of a composite-metal sleeve that screws together inside your BB shell for a secure, creak-free seat for the supplied 30mm bearings. 2 OTE ANYTIME BARS £1.30, otesports.co.uk To misappropriate the words of Keith Bontrager, energy bars can be nutritious, cheap or tasty. Pick two. Then there’s these flapjack-style bars. They’re still double the cost of a Snickers, but in the grand scheme of endurance sport supplements £1.30 a bar is very competitive, and each packs 35g of slow-release carbs.…

Frankly I’m beginning to question Carol’s six TV Weather Presenter of the Year awards If there’s a formula to explain a day’s cycling it would go something like this: pj = TW – P/A , where T is terrain, W is weather, P is number of people, A is land area and pj is pedalling joy. Just like a bike manufacturer’s stiffness index for its latest round of carbon fibre, terrain and weather are totally arbitrary values based on the concept that ‘bigger numbers means better’, and are marked based on an unknown, ever-expanding scale (pj, however, is precisely measured on a scale of one to Esteban Chaves). For example, my commute from the outskirts of London last Friday came in at -5,521 Chavitos. The terrain was…

LAZER Z1 HELMET One of the early victims of Brexit, the Z1 has shot up in price, but has gained MIPS innards in the process and still offers an excellent fit and understated styling. Although perhaps less so in orange. £220, madison.co.uk SPORTFUL FIANDRE WINDSTOPPER JACKET Kept me dry and noticeably warm for a garment so lightweight. The extra-long sleeves might look a bit Euro, but only add to the overall versatility of the Fiandre. £185, c3products.com KATUSHA KIT A spin-off from the WorldTour team of the same name, the Superlight jersey and Icon bibshorts might polarise fashion opinion, but indisputable is the quality and race-ready fit. No gimmicks, it’s just very nice to ride in. Jersey £120, bibshorts £180,…

Where normally a Windstopper or Gore-Tex jacket contains three layers of fabric – a backer (next to the skin), a membrane (the waterproof Gore-Tex itself), and a face fabric to offer insulation, durability and colour, with the One jacket there’s no need. The only material is the Gore-Tex membrane itself. Historically a single layer hasn’t been an option because although the fabric is waterproof, droplets could rest on the surface of the fabric and chill the skin through the single layer. This jacket, however, employs a new technology called ShakeDry that encourages water to drip off the fabric immediately. Even after being totally submerged, a few shakes of the jacket will leave it bone dry. It’s advanced stuff, but with a recommend retail price of £220, you’d hope for nothing…

The signature of any bicycle is its head badge, which speaks to the heritage and ethos of the builder. In Richard Williamson’s garage, neatly stacked in sets of wooden drawers, are row after row of metal head badges. ‘It all started when I went out and met this chap on the M40, gave him some money and came back with a load of badges. I’ve added a lot to them because once you set off down this path, well, you’re on your way aren’t you? I think it started with around 150 and now I’ve got around 400. ‘This Bates one is rare as hens’ teeth and, look, there’s a Hetchins one there. Some of the French ones are beautiful – they’re so ornate. I get them from all over.…

£300, dhwagencies.com We know what you’re thinking: how can this tiny plastic box, suspended under your handlebars, measure power output? With no strain gauges anywhere to be seen, the Power Pod takes a unique approach to calculating your wattage. And herein lies the crux – it’s a calculation, using a clever algorithm that analyses the airstream collected through the wind port at the front, versus your actual speed data (transmitted from a secondary Ant+ sensor, such as a Garmin or similar – not supplied). This goes against the accepted norms of actually measuring a force input from your legs (in the way a strain gauge measures the tiny bending forces in cranks and axles etc) but that’s not to say there’s anything wrong with that. Ultimately, how the numbers are…

£556.99, chickencyclekit.co.uk What’s an Argentinian meteorologist’s favourite wheel? That’ll be the Zonda, named after the dry wind that whistles down the eastern slopes of the Andes. Up until now, if that meteorologist rode a disc bike they’d have been unable to fit it with Campagnolo’s redoubtably stiff, mid-priced alloy wheelset. All things shall come to pass, though, even where the notoriously traditional Italians are concerned, so here is Campagnolo’s first ever disc brake wheel. Most notable is the rim shape, which bears not even the merest hint of a redundant rim-track, a facet of early disc rims as makers rushed to make disc-only wheels. The G3 spoke pattern (where spokes are grouped in threes) that features on most of Campagnolo’s rear wheels now features on the front too, to cope…

The Fuji Altamira, the predecessor to the current super-lightweight Fuji SL, has a long history in climbing. Juan José Cobo won the Vuelta a Espana aboard a Fuji Altamira in 2011, and it was championed by the NetApp-Endura (now Bora-Hansgrove) team. At a weight of just 6.5kg in this spec, it was an extremely capable partner on these slopes. The Ultegra wheelset isn’t the normal spec, but a downgrade from the Oval carbon tubulars the Altamira comes with. Tubulars seemed a little risky for this trip, so I opted for these more workmanlike clinchers, and I was impressed. And despite the bike’s racing pedigree I was surprised by its level of comfort, especially given the Fuji’s rigid response to my pedalling efforts. The compliance could be something to do with…

In our consumer-driven world, it’s important to give the customer what they want, and this month we have three brands doing their damnedest to meet our every whim. The Whyte Wessex claims to epitomise what the majority of UK road riders actually need; the Hypervox is Swift’s answer to creating an aero bike that doesn’t make concessions to the things that usually afflict aero bikes; and the Bastion is, well, whatever you want it to be.…

THE SPEC Model Whyte Wessex Groupset Shimano Ultegra 6800 Deviations Shimano ST-685 shift levers and BR-805 hydraulic disc brakes, FSA Gossamer Pro chainset Wheels Easton AR-21 Finishing kit Whyte Road compact alloy handlebar, Whyte alloy stem, Whyte alloy seatpost, Whyte saddle Weight 9.73kg Price £2,250 Contact atb-sales.co.uk As road bikes go, the Whyte Wessex seems to be a bit of a paradox. Dressing what appears to be a fairly aero carbon frame up with full mudguards, disc brakes and 30mm tyres suggests it’s a little confused about its identity. But is it confused, or are we? After all, us road riders are the ones fixated on categorising bikes and unable to make up our minds about what we want to do on them. According to Whyte, the Wessex…

THE SPEC Model Swift Hypervox Groupset Shimano Dura-Ace 9100 Deviations None Wheels Black Inc Thirty clinchers Finishing kit Zipp Contour SL bars, Zipp SL Sprint stem, Swift Custom Aero seatpost, Fabric Scoop Carbon saddle Weight 6.91kg (medium) Price £2,499 (frameset), approx £5,600 as tested Contact swiftcarbon.co.uk I can’t be sure, but I think Swift’s founder, Mark Blewett, was Cyclist’s first ever visitor way back in 2012 when we launched this magazine. I made tea as we’d yet to unpack the coffee machine, and he showed us his debut UK road frame, the Ultravox RS-1. At that time new brands peddling carbon wares seemed ten-a-penny, but Swift sounded different. It’s no secret that the majority of the world’s mass-produced carbon bikes come from a relative handful of Chinese factories,…