Monthly Archives: March 2012

Colnago hits 10,000 Facebook fans

Posted on by Manolo

Colnago is known for its iconic Italian bikes and its unique his­tory of suc­cess in the pro­fes­sional pelo­ton. The com­pany has now hit a new mile­stone after 10,000 peo­ple became a fan of the Colnago offi­cial Facebook page.

The Colnago Facebook page has attracted fans from around the world that love the company’s cur­rent range of stun­ning car­bon fibre bikes and the clas­sic Colnago bike of the past used by the greats of the sport.

Colnago reg­u­larly posts news, pho­tographs and video about its bikes and shares news about Team Europcar, Colnago-CSF Inox, Team Type 1 Sanofi and other teams who all use Colnago bikes in the pro peloton.

During the Taipei bike show, Colnago unveiled the inno­v­a­tive Colnago C59 Disc bike and the Colnago K.Zero time trial bike on its offi­cial Facebook page. While in February Facebook fans were able to cel­e­brate Ernesto Colnago’s 80th birth­day and the see the first pho­tographs of the Colnago C59 Ottanta bike made to cel­e­brate the occasion.

Fans also post and share pho­tographs of their own Colnago bikes on the offi­cial Facebook page and so are able to share their love of every­thing Colnago with other fans.

Become a Facebook fan of the Colnago offi­cial page here.

 

 

Jérôme Cousin dom­i­nates in Normandy

Posted on by Manolo

Jérôme Cousin took his first win as a pro­fes­sional at the Tour de Normandie after being part of a 170km break­away that dom­i­nated the sec­ond stage from Colombelles to Forges-les-Eaux.

The for­mer French national pur­suit cham­pion used his speed and endurance to work hard all day and then beat Guillaume Malle and Alexander Pluschin in the sprint to the line. The trio fin­ished 2:18 ahead of the pelo­ton, giv­ing Cousin a com­mand­ing over­all lead.

“This is a great per­for­mance. This win repays the team for all their hard work. We decided to bring a young team to this race and Jérôme took his chance.  He’s worked hard for the team in the past and now he’s been paid back. He’s tal­ented,” directeur sportif Ismael Mottier said with pride.

It is Team Europcar’s sec­ond vic­tory of the 2012 after Pierre Rolland won stage three of Etoile de Bessèges.

Colnago remem­bers Merckx dur­ing Giro d’Italia Hall of Fame ceremony

Posted on by Manolo

Eddy Merckx has become the first rider to be inducted in the Giro d’Italia Hall of Fame, at a spe­cial event in Milan, where his for­mer rivals and friends look back with admi­ra­tion and affec­tion at the Belgian rider’s career.

Ernesto Colnago was Merckx’s per­sonal mechan­i­cal in the late six­ties and sev­en­ties and built many of the bikes Merckx rode to win many of his great­est vic­to­ries. Colnago also built the spe­cial, superlight, but super strong track bike Merckx used to smash the hour record in Mexico in 1972.

“I’m 80 and was a mechanic for almost 50 years and I will never for­get how Eddy was obsessed about his bikes,” Colnago remembered.

“He liked to try all kinds of dif­fer­ent frame angles. For one edi­tion of Liege-Bastogne-Liege he wanted a spe­cific bike made for him, with really steep angles. I dis­agreed but built it. Of course he won the race but I know that using a badly fit­ting bit made him suf­fer like crazy for days afterwards.”

“People think Eddy was a can­ni­bal off the bike as well as on it. The truth is that he’s a great per­son and we all cel­e­brated together late into the night when he broke the hour record.”

After the Giro d’Italia Hall of Fame pre­sen­ta­tion, Colnago and many of the big names in Italian cycling toasted Merckx’s career at a spe­cial char­ity din­ner. All the Colnago fam­ily attended with Ernesto invit­ing a spe­cial guest: Fabio Capello, the for­mer England foot­ball manager.

C59 Disc

Posted on by daretothink

Welcome to a new era of high per­for­mance road bike brak­ing, the Colnago C59 Disc.

Colnago have taken a bold step towards the future of road bike evo­lu­tion with the intro­duc­tion of the C59 Disc. Featuring fully hydraulic front and rear disc brakes it is set to bring a whole new level of per­for­mance and safety to the Colnago road bike line. The frame and fork are fully com­pat­i­ble with stan­dard PM calipers too.

With twin 140mm diam­e­ter discs the frame and fork have also been redesigned in the key areas where the brakes are mounted. The fork is com­pletely new, whilst at the rear of the main frame the chain­stays and the seat­stays are also new, to cope with the increased load­ing that the disc brakes gen­er­ate at their mount­ing points. The C59 Disc is com­pat­i­ble with both elec­tronic and mechan­i­cal groupsets.

Along with the main chas­sis changes, Colnago have also designed their own match­ing wheel sys­tem, the Artemis Disc. These wheels fea­ture disc-specific hubs and full car­bon com­pos­ite wheel rims.

Now, no mat­ter the weather, you can have the most pow­er­ful and con­trol­lable brak­ing sys­tem avail­able on a road bicy­cle. The sys­tem is easy to ser­vice, should it ever need ser­vic­ing - as the sys­tem is essen­tially closed and there are no cables to replace or wear out. The reg­u­lar main­te­nance will only con­sist of check­ing the brake pads for wear, and replac­ing them when needed - which is a sim­ple five minute job.

K.Zero

Posted on by daretothink

Bicycle effi­ciency can be sep­a­rated into two key areas. How well the bicy­cle con­verts the power from the rider to power at the rear wheel to drive it for­wards - and how well the bicy­cle resists being slowed down by the air it passes through as it moves. These two things are the deci­sive fac­tors when it comes to effi­ciency. All of our bicy­cles are excep­tion­ally good at turn­ing rider power into rear wheel power, and so the main area in which Colnago could make improve­ments to effi­ciency on a new Time Trial machine was how well it resisted the drag effects of mov­ing through air.

In its most sim­ple terms, aero­dy­namic drag is pro­por­tional to the square of the speed - in other words if you ride along at 20kph, and then increase your speed to 40kph you will expe­ri­ence four time as much drag. So hav­ing a bicy­cle that has a low amount of drag to begin with gives greater ben­e­fits the faster you ride.

But there is a bal­ance to be had with reduc­ing drag on a bicy­cle. We could go too far and make a bicy­cle that no longer rides like a good bike should. And that is what we have been very care­ful of with the cre­ation of the K.Zero. It rides likes a Colnago bicy­cle should, offer­ing com­pro­mise per­for­mance whilst deliv­er­ing increased aero­dy­namic performance.

The mains area we have sought to find per­for­mance increases in are the areas that cause air flow over the bicy­cle to be dis­turbed the most. We found that by con­trol­ling the air flow where we needed to, we could bet­ter con­trol the air as it passed over other key areas of the bicy­cle struc­ture. Our research focused upon the han­dle­bar and stem area, the brake sys­tems front and rear, and also the pro­files of the tube sec­tions being used. All of this was done within the tight restric­tions put in place by the UCI - ensur­ing our K.Zero is fully UCI com­pli­ant for com­pe­ti­tion use.

As with any bicy­cle where aero­dy­namic drag is one of the main design con­cerns, it is a mat­ter of mak­ing small reduc­tions in drag over many areas. When all of the small reduc­tions are added together, only then can large ben­e­fits be found. This is one of the mains aspects of the K.Zero - the small details all add up to big benefits.

Brakes

The brakes are fully inte­grated into the fork and the frame, with­out com­pro­mis­ing the struc­tural integrity of either. With the rear cable fully enclosed to fur­ther reduce the aero­dy­namic drag, the rear brakes are then hid­den with an aero­dy­namic cover which aids the con­di­tion­ing of the air­flow along the under­sides of the chainstays.

Handlebar/stem

The han­dle­bar and stem assem­bly is one bespoke unit. Unlike tra­di­tional bar/stem inter­faces we have cho­sen not to turn the aero­dy­namic pro­file of the bar into a round shape to inte­grate into the stem. Instead, the stem is of the same pro­file shape as the bar. This has led to a stem/bar joint where the stress lev­els are also greatly reduced, allow­ing us to make a light­weight bar and stem sys­tem that is also aero­dy­nam­i­cally supe­rior to a tra­di­tional sys­tem. The clip-on sec­tions can them be tuned in height and reach for rider posi­tion­ing, thus keep­ing the main aero sec­tion of the gars in the opti­mal posi­tion, and within the UCI reg­u­la­tions. Another addi­tional fea­ture of the new stem/bar inter­face is the com­plete inte­gra­tion of the cables required for shift­ing and brak­ing. Again, this leads to small but cru­cially impor­tant drag reduc­tions in one of the key areas of the bicycle.

Tube pro­files

Several NACA derived tube pro­files were tested through­out the design process, again, all within the UCI reg­u­la­tions. It is the use of these pro­files in both stan­dard and mod­i­fied form when viewed as a com­plete sys­tem that form the basis for the K.Zero chas­sis. The design looked at the inter­ac­tion between pro­files as a com­plete sys­tem, and not as indi­vid­ual tube pro­files. This is an area of design flow that has always been a Colnago way of think­ing. A bicy­cle is a com­plete sys­tem, not just indi­vid­ual parts, and as such is has to be designed from the very begin­ning as a com­plete sys­tem where all of the parts work in har­mony to make the end prod­uct the best avail­able in terms of effi­ciency and performance.

Groupsets

K.Zero will be avail­able for every top of the range groupset, being Campagnolo, Shimano or Sram. The same frame will be fully com­pat­i­ble with both elec­tronic and mechan­i­cal versions.

Canola strikes first for Colnago-CSF Inox

Posted on by Manolo

Marco Canola gave the Colnago-CSF Inox team its first vic­tory of the 2012 sea­son at the Tour de Langkawi, win­ning stage seven to Kuantan with a per­fect sprint after being in the break­away of the day.

Canola is one of sev­eral tal­ented first year pro­fes­sion­als in the Colnago-CSF Inox but took his vic­tory with con­fi­dence. He made sure he was part of the break­away that formed early in the 205km stage, went with the right attacks in the finale and then had the fin­ish­ing speed to win, beat­ing Joon Yong Seo of Korea and Serguei Klimov of Russia.

“This vic­tory is for the team and gives me the moral for the future,” Canola said.

“Before the start I was focused on doing some­thing but I hon­estly didn’t think I’d win. I think I pulled it off because I raced intelligently.”

Team man­ager Roberto Reverberi was rightly happy that the Colnago-CSF Inox team had secured the first vic­tory of the sea­son, boost­ing moral in the team as another squad pre­pares to ride the Strade Bianche race in Tuscany on Saturday and then the WorldTour Tirreno-Adriatico stage race.

“With 15km to go I told Canola to save him­self and focus on the sprint. We got the tac­tics right and Canola didn’t do a thing wrong,” Reverberi explained proudly.

The 10-day Tour de Langkawi ends on Sunday, leav­ing three more chances of vic­tory for Colnago-CSF Inox.