Faster Faster Faster.

I was watching the team time trial in the Tour De France yesterday and was stoked to see Team Leopard Trek on the speed concept 9.9. I feel like I know those bikes inside out after assembling one for a customer last week. The speed concept 9.9 isn't your average bike, it's filled with more carbon fibre and technology than a formula one car. It has been subjected to extensive low speed aerodynamic testing making it one of the fastest bikes on the planet. In everything but a direct head wind this thing achieves thrust. It's frontal profile is like a knife cutting through a head wind. It is a technological marvel.

Getting this bike out of the box and all the subsequent packaging was a task in itself, it was easily the most comprehensively packaged bicycle I have eve come across. It was also the least assembled bicycle straight from the box, here you can see that the chainset has been installed and the fork but almost nothing else.

The frame profile is such that the Speed concept wouldn't fit well in our usual repair stands so I had to go and get the old faithful cast iron steam punk stand from upstairs. I had to pack the jaws of the stand with plenty of foam nip it up very lightly and then zip tie it all in.

I was fairly certain that it wouldn't fall out of the stand at this point but my anus was still twitching with a 7 1/2 thousand pound bike wobbling about in the steam punker. I remedied this and put my nerves in check by covering the floor in more foam padding just incase there was a mishap.

With the precise tolerances and materials in this bicycle everything has to be precisely torqued. There are a few jobs on higher end bicycles where I always use the torque wrench but never before have I built a bicycle using a torque on every bolt.

The tri-bars were an absolute nightmare to fit, the cabling for the brakes had been done euro style so it had to be all hauled out and refit the other way round. Total nightmare. With internal and concealed cabling of this nature it's best to stay calm and take your time, resolve yourself to a slow build and it all usually pans out. But I was building this bike on bike week so it was super busy in the shop, we kept getting distracted, Lynne was on a wind up mission all day and the customer was coming in to sit on this thing at 3pm so the pressure was extremely high. At around 1 pm I managed to get an inner cable stuck in the intricacies of the tri-bar interior and as much as Dave and I pulled, twisted and shoved this thing it just wouldn't budge. There was a tense silence in the work shop. Sweaty brows were abundant and tempers were frayed. I had to take a step back and try to think logically. After much duress we came upon the idea of rolling the inner cable up like a coil and forming a handle that could be spun and this got the stuck end moving and after a bout 10 minutes we edged it out the end of the hole in the bars. The relief was imense.

This bike is notoriously difficult to cable, all the gearing cable had come through wrong. The gear cables at the bb junction were sat wrong and they had to be shortened. This is a complex process of removing the brake shielding, removing the rear brake and cabling, removing a cable guide plate and then maneuvering two concealed cables into two distinct and opposing directions, not easy with people winding you up and fiddling with everything you remove.

"oooohh, look at that", "eeeh isn't it complicated" and "so how does that work?" were all sentences being fired at me while I struggled to comprehend the set up myself. What makes things worse is that the speed concept comes with zero instructions and almost no online support. A lot of this build was guess work, a lot of the Trek's cabling seems oddly arranged and counter intuitive.

Sram Red groupo was an absolute treat. Here you can see the rear mech and block, the block is machined from a single piece of material, it has a spiral of shortened indexing teeth and is one of the most beautifully crafted bicycle components I've seen. I was hoping this bike was going to come through with Di2 digital shifting because of the nightmare these things are to cable but the customer went for Sram red saving himself 1500 quid in the process. The time trail shifters have a confusing aerodynamically adjustable neutrality which had me stumped for a bit but when I worked it out the gearing on this bike was unquestionably solid.

Here it is all done. The lunch box out back makes the bike more aerodynamically efficient and you can carry power bars and the like. The Bonty water bottle is super aerodynamic also. This is a picture after the customer had been fitted on the rolling road for maximum aerodynamics and comfort. I love the full black paint, this thing is a stealth machine fast light, stiff. You don't buy a bike like this unless you're super serious about going fast, it costs the same as a small car and if you crash it it's gonna explode in a spectacular shower of shredded carbon fibre. I've built and worked on quite a few different time trial bikes but this was easily the most complicated and frustrating but the overall finished product was the most beautiful and efficient.