Would it be possible to use a Quintana Roo Tiphoon for road racing ? I was thinking maybe put drop bars on and slide the seat back, or would it still not have the handling required for that type of racing.
I wouldn’t even think about it. It’s a big enough challenge converting road geometry bikes for tri but going the other way would be even more challenging.
Man, that is just a bad idea…besides…do you really wanna show up at a road race with dorky 650’s? (glad I never got on that bandwagon).
650c and 78 degrees or 700c and 76 degrees? I think you could do it with the slacker seat seat angle. Just use a seatpost with a lot of setback and slide the saddle as far back as you can. You may need a shorter stem.
I think the seat angle would be the least of your worries. As pointed out by john, shoving the saddle back will decrease the seat angle easily. The more pertinent issue would be front end height. Don’t forget that a bike designed for tri, as the TiPhoon is, has a head tube quite a bit shorter than a standard road bike. Don’t forget that there’s a limit to recommended stack height. I’ve contemplated this myself, as I like my road bike seat angle around 74-75 degrees (big leg-to-torso ratio), and I think that you would have to use a “tweener” frame (e.g. QR Trueno and Cervelo Soloist set-forward, Dual set-back, or One) to get positioned closest to optimal.
The stack may be an issue, I have plenty out already. I was thinking of upgrading the frame for triathlon and as my old road bike is dead it seemed like a good idea to use the old QR frame for road use, being titanium it has plenty of miles left in it. It is a 700c 76 degree bike. Although a guy I know does use a 650c Principia the road races, the roadies call his bike ‘the wheelbarrow’
Something like a Thomson setback seatpost and a riser stem and you could make it work. That bike should climb like a rocket, it would be interesting to see how it would do on the flats.