Does anyone know if Clas or Bjorn got a P3C for IMNZ ?
I have a feeling if his swim goes well, NZ is his, there’s a real strong chance that a Cervelo rider might take the first IM win of the season.
Those 2 guys are on the verge and I can’t imagine Cervelo doing any better than Clas and Bjorn as sponsored athletes.
As far as a manufacturers cup…my money for 2005 is on Cervelo,Giant and Litespeed.
Luke Bell and Michellie Jones are going to be faster on their new sleek Giant TT bikes… which IMHO are just wicked.
IF… Bjorn gets a P3 Carbon w/ Zipp Z9’s,or 404’s w/ the Z Ceramic bearings…him and Norman will be unreal to watch…their swims are close…so they could be even out of T1.
THAT would be this generations version of the 1989 Allen/Scott epic.
I posed this question about a month ago and got no response, I think it will be a case of wait and see unless Gerard intervenes or someone who knows a Cervelo sponsored athlete responds.
Come on Swordfish… Don’t believe all the marketers tell you. I am sure as hell that no scientist alive could begin to think about measuring the difference between Bjorn with or without the Zipp Z bearings and if Luke Bell and Michellie Jones are faster on the new Giant TT it will be measured in fractions of a second not Ironman winning minutes.
Bjorn and Norman would be awesome to watch riding $200 (well fitted) ten speeds and probably 95% as fast as if they were on P3 carbons. Only trouble is Norman gives up a fair amount of time to Bjorn in the swim (especially when he sleeps in and misses the start).
Unlike formula one and contrary to what the bike companies elude to, the equipment between the top performers has zero effect on the final result.
Nope, neither Clas nor Bjorn will be on a P3 Carbon. No athlete will get a P3 Carbon before all back-orders in their size for regular customers have been filled. Well OK, maybe one athlete will.
And Swordfish is right that we couldn’t ask for better athletes than triathletes like Bjorn and Clas. In fact, this year we are scaling back our athlete sponsorships as we want to focus on those who really give us good feedback, and Bjorn and Clas are at the top of the list for that. At the same time this will allow us to put more effort into getting feedback from our other customers (one reason for becoming a large part of the Ironman Villages in North America).
…how is production/shipping going for the rest of your models? Are you guys shipping at full capacity the rest of your line or have you been hurt by the ‘carbon’ shortage in the industry and Shimano’s shortcoming on volumes?
Depends on what you define as full capacity. We are shipping more than last year, but we can do that with our eyes closed. There are definitely some limitations due to shortages, although Shimano is pretty good to us, they may be short but they can tell you exactly how much they will ship and when. But some other vendors are much worse. The carbon shortage doesn’t really affect us much. It is more for the lower grade carbons, not so much for the stuff we use.
Whether a Ceverlo sponsored athlete wins at IMNZ or not, for what it is worth, and I don’t have absolutely accurate numbers on this, I would say that Cervelo has been the “winningst” bike in triathlon over the last few years, particularly at the IM distance. Pick an IM event, and there always seems to be at least one or two in the top 5 places in both the men’s and women’s races.
Fleck -I think you’re right about Cervelo’s IM victories …with the exception of Kona ( mens).?
At IMLP last year it was practically a Cervelo-fest.
Smart move for Cervelo to partner up w/ IMNA.
As an aside…Its really too bad that Tyler H didn’t stay w/ Team CsC .
He really was amazing,and could have been a true champ.
I always thought that if CSC signed Tyler, David Millar and Vinokourov they would be just awesome.
I’ve always been surprised at this because really when you look at it, we have very few athletes. The crazy part is that I am not exactly sure how many races we have won, as I only started keeping track in the past few years and I think I am missing a few. Just for the P3 alone there are 14 wins to the best of my knowledge.
As for Hawaii, that to me is like the Tour. It’s not difficult to win, you identify who can win the event and then outbid anybody else who wants to win it. But to be honest I don’t really think it is worth it, the exposure is great and some of these guys give great feedback (Peter Reid comes to mind as a guy who can offer a lot to a bike sponsor and who will eventually win Hawaii for you), but some of the other ones can give you the win but no significant feedback or anything else. And in that case I’d rather have Bjorn ride my bike and actually tell me what he likes or hates about it.
Plus, you can only spend your money once, if I have the choice (which actually I did) to have a top Hawaii contender ride my bike or to be at all IMNA events and be able to talk to 20,000 of my best customers, it’s an easy choice for me.
I don’t mean to say I don’t want somebody to win the Tour or Hawaii on a Cervelo, I would love it. But it would have to be a fluke, a by-product of something else we’re trying to do. If Bjorn or Basso wins, it won’t be because everybody knew they would and we therefore signed them. It will be because we saw something else in them and that happened to result in a big win. Which incidentally is also how Trek won the Tour, the hard way.
The first thing I remember from bjorn was pretty simple, he wanted to use these enormous rings that not even CSC would ride. So we looked at derailleur hanger placement. He never complained about it or anything, in fact I don’t think he ever even brought it up, he just used a Campy crank on a Shimano bike for a while. Just to give you an idea on how difficult these small things can sometimes be, at the same time as Bjorn is putting a 58t chainring on, more and more consumers are asking if they can put a compact crank with a SMALLER chainring on their P3 (and yes, they can). But there isn’t much play in the FD position anymore thanks to this increased spread that our riders want.
From Basso/Riis, you will notice that the geometry on the P3 Carbon is a bit different than on the P3 SL. In this case, the requirements from them and from our more regular customers were actually identical, so that was an easy one.
The best one from CSC may be Sastre, I e-mail with him a few times a week. When he got his R2.5 prototype at the Dauphine in 2003, he loved and hated it. It was so stiff that it was super uncomfortable, and he already has a bad back. He had trouble getting out of bed every morning, but he refused to switch to another bike. He said he would get used to it and wanted to give us more feedback so he kept on riding it. The next iteration of the R2.5, the one that actually went into production, was almost completely at the other end of the comfort spectrum, yet in the stiffness tests as we used them back then it tests about the same (and correctly so, as they are not necessarily connected, but at least now we have added a different test that does show these differences). Of course he has indeed gotten used to the prototype and won stage 13 of the Tour on it.
These are just some examples from stuff that is already in production, obviously given the cost/timing curve there is a limit to what you can do with an already finished or at least already (partially) developed model. There is a lot more feedback that goes into frames that started their development after we received the feedback, so we can really design stuff from scratch with certain things in mind.
Gerard, when you mentioned Basso’s discomfort with the R2.5 prototype
"The next iteration of the R2.5, the one that actually went into production, was almost completely at the other end of the comfort spectrum, yet in the stiffness tests as we used them back then it tests about the same (and correctly so, as they are not necessarily connected, but at least now we have added a different test that does show these differences).
Is that true for the 2005 model? I hope to be buying a 2.5 Chorus soon and am surprised to hear that it was so stiff that it was super uncomfortable, that was just the prototype right? How is supply of these right now?
This was back in 2003 and it was Sastre, not Basso (who didn’t join CSC until 2004). And you are correct that this was just one prototype, never to be revisited again.
Availability in the chorus is less than the demand, so I think you’ll find a lot of people who will say availability is not good. But I think that in the next two months we’ll catch up with everything, I see things approving right now in the industry, not deteriorating as some have indicated.
