From Velonews.com
VN: There is a time trial bike absent in your 2010 line. Is that something you foresee for Gary Fisher?
GF: I was just talking with our engineers about trying some new things, even some non-UCI legal stuff. When you go non-UCI legal there are more possibilities of making a faster bike. Conversely you want to be UCI legal so that it can be raced and won on to generate more popularity. These two forces work against each other. Maybe it’s Trek’s place to be the legal producer and my place to be the illegal one. Who buys time trial bikes? Triathletes. And they don’t have the same restrictions. There is a tremendous opportunity there.
The Full Interview:
http://www.velonews.com/article/96786/gary-fisher-on-the-road-a-conversation-with-the-mountain
Thanks for posting this link…very interesting stuff from him. He has always been an innovator and it would be great to see something not constrained by rules that don’t apply to most of us. I recall reading some articles about how he and buddies “invented” the MTB so they could ride Mt Tam. They modified road bikes to make the first mtb so I suppose his origins are with the road bike anyway…
Great article, thanks for posting. I love the last part about building non-UCI bikes because less than one percent of people are concerned about it.
Sounds like a smart businessman to me, I’m excited to see what they come up with.
its not really true that the first MTB’s were modified road bikes. they started life as something closer to a beach cruiser. however, once the mt. tam crew got into racing uphill as well as down, gary fisher and others realized that lighter weight frames would be an improvement, and he started experimenting with road frame mods. the primary issues at first were strengthening the fork/head tube area, and raising the bottom bracket.
Interesting stuff. He has pushed the envelope in the Mtb. world. I will be very interested to see what he does with a TT bike
I have an original paper version of that article, since I subscribed to Coevolution Quarterly back in the 1970s. Its a major reason why I was racing mountain bikes in the UK in the very early 1980’s. Note the second sentence quoted there: *“**Gary Fisher got the idea of putting a ten-speed dérailleur assembly on a balloon-tired bicycle” ***The picture clearly shows that they were not riding road bikes down Mt. Tam in the early days.
my basic argument was that mish mashing some parts together for another purpose isnt new.
I think you’ve missed the point I was making entirely. That article describes precisely the same thing and same time period I was referring to. It describes Fisher, Breeze and others adding “road” components (i.e derailleurs) to cruiser bikes. In 1976-1977, this was new.