Getting each new copy of Rouleur is almost a religious experience. It is printed on heavy paper, and has a particular smell about it; the pages are printed with a mat finish, so the heavy, rough pages feel a certain way in your hands as you turn them. There is no other periodical that I’m aware of that has the same feel to it; reading each issue is an experience unto itself.

Issue 16 came yesterday, and it has some incredible features, including a retrospective on Team Z – one of the coolest teams ever – and a history of Shimano – one of the most iconic component manufacturers in cycling.

As I thumbed the pages through my first pass of the content, I took some photos in an effort to share the experience.

Of course, you’ll have to order one for yourself for the full effect.

In 1998, Marco Pantani staged one of the most prestigious coups of cycling by winning the Giro-Tour double.  He made this run aboard what I believe to be the most beautiful bike in history, a Celeste steed with a yellow section of frame starting at the seat collar and spreading out down the tops of the seatstays, top tube, and seat tube.

Very little is actually known about this bike; it was a one-off creation made especially for Il Pirata by the Bianchi Reparto Corse division which makes all the top-end bikes for the company.   Some say the frame is aluminum, others claim it was boron.  The frame undeniably used a compact geometry (this is commonplace now, but it was unique in ‘98), but whether the top tube sloped up or down seems to be a point of contention: did the top but slope up to give a longer head tube to bring his bars up to accommodate his unique in-the-drops climbing style or was the top tube sloped down towards the seat tube in order to reduce the weight of the frame and increase the stiffness of the rear triangle?

The bike has captured my imagination for a long time.  I love the way the saddle and tires match the portion of the frame where they intersect in what I call the “Yellow Cluster”; the vision of Pantani climbing out of the saddle on the Col du Galibier with those flashes of yellow swaying back and forth as he danced up the mountain remains one of the coolest images of cycling.  I studied his bike extensively when I was building my Bianchi XL EV2 and I mimicked it’s setup, choosing a yellow Flite saddle and solid yellow tires.  To this day I love the looks of that bike, and Pantani’s setup has even influenced one or two of The Rules.

I’ve searched the net over for information on his bike, hoping that at some point someone would find and catalog it for the world.  Occasionally, there will be an article posted somewhere that covers the bike, but each of these has ended up a disappointment as upon closer inspection, it is revealed that the bike is not in fact his tour-winning bike.

I did, however, find one article on Campy Only which appears to showcase the real deal.  It comes from an account by a fan at a post-tour criterium in 1998 where Pantani made an appearance:

Here you have the pictures of Pantani’s bike. Note that he is using tubulars on his Electron wheels, even for this small race. He seems to love this bike. In the Giro he used the normal team bike on the flat stages, but since the mountains he has not been apart from this ultralight “hillclimber” (except for time trials). I think the weight is about 7 kilos, but is is of course a very small bike.

The use of a downtube lever and the modified Ergo lever is a funny detail. It is very unusual these days to see homemade stuff like this on a pro’s bike, and he even won the two major tours on it–it’s a classic bike, this one!

Recently on CyclingNews.com, they did a Retro Bike review of Pantani’s 1998 ride, reportedly stored at the Bianchi museum.  I was thrilled and dove into the photos, looking for answers to questions I probably didn’t know I had.  Unfortunately, closer inspection revealed a host of problems with the bike;  I am sad to report that this is not in fact Pantani’s bike, and in all likelihood did not even exist in 1998.  It appears to be nothing more than the Bianchi team replica frame clumsily loaded with a 1999 Campy Record 9-speed groupo.  The items that give this fact away are: non-compact geometry, carbon Ergo levers, no front down tube shifter (and accompanying left-side Ergo lever with guts removed), black and yellow tires (instead of his solid yellow tubulars), and silver Time mag pedals (he rode red ones in 1999).  This could possibly be a late-season racer or a 1999 trainer, but in any case, it is not his 1998 Giro-Tour winning magical steed.  Since it appears his real bike eludes even the Bianchi museum, my only hope is that he kept it for himself and it resides somewhere in the Pantani estate.

Issue 15 just arrived on my doorstop, and it is especially good and is going to take a good long time to work through all the way to the back cover. But I can tell you about the beginning, which was particularly captivating. It started with a great piece on Jeremy Hunt (written by Domestique/Journalist extraordinaire Michael Barry), then slid into a wonderful one-pager on what it means to be a Super-Domestique. It was the next piece, however, that stopped me in my tracks. It’s entitled only “Gios” and the cover shot is of an old Gios gingerly tucked under a translucent plastic tarp like a Michelangelo during a remodel, with it’s corked bottles perched on the handlebars providing the only real clue as to the bicycle’s age.

The author starts with a two-page rant asserting that it is, in fact, about the bike and anyone who says otherwise stands a nonzero chance of be a douchebag. Those aren’t his words – I’m paraphrasing a bit – but it is the gist of what he’s getting at.

Then comes the following quote. This particular section describes “a friend” who is at this stage of his marriage not allowed to mention his bicycle in his home for fear of suffering a painful divorce as a consequence. I’m assuming part of the risk is that he would somehow loose his bikes in the divorce. He is relegated to a small room where he and his cousin may mention la bicicletta.

It is there that he and his unhinged cousin, the one who wears his heart rate monitor while gardening, yabber on pedantically about life’s rudiments such as Speedplay, VO₂ max and float while their incredulous, shell-shocked wives deal with all the peripheral stuff – their children, their homes, the public preservation of the sham of normalcy, every single thing that is not cycling. My own father retains expensive bicycles in three separate European countries. My mother has a 25-year old microwave oven.

That actually sounds a lot like my own parents, aside from the fact that my mother actually has a good number of bicycles of her own – including an old-school Aluminum Alan and a Scalpel – although I suspect her accumulation of bikes has more to do with my father’s guilt than with her desire to groom a stable.

We are a strange lot, we cyclists.

I’ve reflected on my bike stable, where it started and where it is now.

Peugeot PX10-LE. 1977. A champagne gold hunk of French madness. It was advertised as Monsieur Thevenet’s current racing model but I doubt he got this. The frame was nothing out of the ordinary but copper wire wrapping at the spoke crossings, sew-ups, 52 x44 Stronglight cranks with drilled out inner chainring! Mon Dieu! French diameter tubes, French threads, French components, all evidence that the French should not be operating so many nuclear power plants. French or not this ride was a totally different experience from the mongrel bikes I had owned or borrowed before.

Bella. 1984. Ed Blank, a Somerville, Mass. builder built me a standard 60cm Columbus steel lugged road frame, a Bella. Ed was a one-man shop. His decals were outrageously detailed and beautiful. He had apprenticed in Italy and his decals were homage to it. I picked up the frame, put it on a table and stared and stared. It was the most beautiful thing in the Universe. It was then built up with Campy Record, the ride was smooth, the handling quick and precise, a profound improvement from the factory produced Peugeot.

Merlin Extralight. 1998. It was the result of the shop owner asking one of those loaded questions, “What size frame do you ride?” My local shop was the second largest Merlin dealer in the state so the town was totally contaminated with shiny Ti bikes. These frames were so expensive my best friend(also my clone) and I went in together on a used frame and fork. I went to the factory to retrieve it. An employee and I buffed it with scotchbright pads, reapplied decals and I walked out with a seemingly brand new Ti frame. That evening my clone and I met at a bar, which had a quiet upstairs. I put the frame on a coffee table in front of us and we toasted our new bike and ourselves repeatedly. We owned a Merlin!
We would go on rides with the co-owned Merlin and one of our steel bikes where a midpoint switch over was required. Moaning ensued but this direct comparison was amazing. The Merlin was much faster for the same effort on the flats and going uphill was completely different, faster effortless floating up. It was the death knell for our trusty steel bikes.
Since then I have assumed I owned the last bike I would ever own. This Ti bike would never rust or fatigue and it was the pinnacle of cycling materials and design.

Last Spring my wife and I were behind the scenes at the Tour of the Gila in New Mexico and every racing bike was carbon, if one poor suffering bastard was on an aluminum bike I didn’t see it. I was slightly off put, “really, titanium? Is it that retro? Am I that retro?”

My local shop rarely sells a Merlin now and Trek is its main line. My friend PJ, an ex-racer who puts in 6,000 miles every year on one of his two Merlin Extralights threw down money for a Madone and sent me this report. His reference to the scene of the crime was where a car recently hit him.

The Madone is simply amazing. I’ve owned a whole pile of bikes, but I’ve never ridden anything like this. First time down the street, it felt stiffer and faster.

I’ve ridden 280 miles since getting back on in a little over a week. 150 have been on the Madone. On the usual bridge ride, the Madone feels light, comfortable — the 2010 bikes have a little bit longer effective top tube and it is exactly what I wanted so the fit is perfect. The BB stiffness is very noticeable. It handles very well, very crisp, likely due to the stiff front end. The BB just doesn’t move. At all. It just feels like all effort goes into making it go.

On the Service Road, once I passed the scene of the crime, the thing just came alive. I was just going along up and down, and got to the end thinking “how did I get here already?”. The thing just jumps up hills, and when I’d get near the top after a normal effort, I’d still have a lot left to just spin the thing up and over. I did the ride in just about three hours, about normal time, and felt a lot fresher than usual after — even after two months off the bike — the thing seems to soak up road shock. Not feeling soft, but just that the shock doesn’t get to you.

All in all, the thing is just incredible. It makes the Merlin feel sluggish if you can believe that. All in all, I’d be loosing some competitive advantage if more of ‘em started showing up on the bike path.

The whole point of this overworked wordy ramble is two-fold. For each of the new bikes I have owned they seemed an order of magnitude better than what came before. Each new one has brought happiness and renewed my love for cycling.
Secondly, I really thought the Merlin was IT, this carbon thing was a nutty fad like Vitus frames, it would pass. OK, I guess this is no surprise to everyone else in the world but I’m wrong and that means I get a badass carbon frame sometime in the future. Oh sweetness.

I’ve made mention before of Rouleur magazine and their amazing, in-depth articles.  In one of the past issues, they had a wonderful piece on frame building  in the eighties and nineties describing how many of the big names sourced the building of frames – especially custom frames – to subcontractors.   The article focused on one contractor in particular, Dario Pegoretti, who went on to start a prestigious boutique bicycle business after the subcontracting business calmed down as advances in technology and frame building processes rendered custom frame building economically impractical for bicycle companies.

Some of the more observant members of society have possibly noticed that not every person is identical in appearance.  In fact, those with the most critical eye for detail have probably reached the conclusion that most people are, in fact, of varying shapes and sizes. This seemingly unimportant fact presents a logistical nightmare for a bicycle manufacturer supplying frames to a professional team, particularly until the late nineties, when nearly every pro bike racer demanded custom geometry or had special material requirements.  Custom geometry was in vogue and it resulted in hundreds of one-off, custom frame builds for the manufacturer supplying a team.  The solution was to farm this work out to specialists who built the bikes to specification in their personal workshops and sent the frame back to be painted up with the company and team logos.  The majority of bikes writing their riders and the company name into the history books were in fact built in tiny workshops by builders like Pegoretti.

I’m guessing a little bit at my next assertion because I wasn’t involved in the decision-making process, but this practice was a logical choice and was easily executed since steel frames were generally built out of fairly limited tube sets and built by using lugs or were TIG-welded together.  Unpainted, frames from one company were in most respects indistinguishable from others, pending detailed inspection which might reveal signature details such as a stamp on a lug with the manufacturer’s name or logo.  It was a far cry from today’s monocoque or semi-monocoque frame construction featuring proprietary tube shapes and frame design – instantly recognizable even from a distance.  Those companies not using carbon or titanium often use proprietary aluminum and steel tubesets which also makes using subcontractors more complicated and they resorted to building their custom frames in-house.

As frame materials progressed towards more exotic and challenging materials such as carbon-fiber and titanium, more and more specialized knowledge was required for construction of the frames.   Custom frame building gradually moved away from using an array of subcontractors and towards partnering with a specialized industry leader who had the expertise and equipment to work with the materials.  For carbon frame construction, this meant not only the manufacture of tubes, but also bonding the tubes to aluminum lugs in use at the time;  TVT was was the preferred partner for this in the eighties and nineties, building frames for everyone from Pinarello to Greg LeMond Bicycles.  On the other hand, titanium requires such a high degree of skill and specialized knowledge that the industry leader was in such high demand that they eventually became their own company, Litespeed.

Custom frame building has gradually fallen out of fashion in the pro peleton.  Today, while some pros still race custom bikes, most are riding molded carbon frames which are too costly for companies to customize.  Riders who once insisted on custom geometry have found that through choices in stem-length, stem rise angles, and seatposts with varying amounts of setback, they are able to tailor the fit of their setup to suit their needs without requiring a custom frame.  That said, in some cases, the geometry simply doesn’t work for a star rider and – if the rider is valuable enough – manufacturers have redesigned their frames in order to accommodate them; the most notable case being that of Tornado Tom Boonen and his Specialized Tarmac.

One of my bikes is a steel Bianchi built of Columbus TSX tubing, designed especially for riders exhibiting a condition cyclists commonly referre to as “being fat”.  TSX was designed to be more durable and stiff for taller and heavier riders, complete with ovalization of the seat tube at the bottom bracket for added torsional stiffness.  I bought the frame from a guy whose credibility I can’t verify but claims he got it from a pro who raced in Europe during the mid nineties and had the frame custom built for him.

There seems to be some degree of likelihood to the claim.  The geometry of my TSX from 1996ish and my XLEV2 from 2002 is noticeably different, as you can see from the photos below (aside from the compact geometry).  While I’m not saying Bianchi didn’t change their geometry, I like to dream that the TSX was built with love and care in a small workshop by an Italian specialist like Pegoretti – or even Pegoretti himself.

It doesn’t hurt to dream.