Is a serotta sizing cycle a reliable tool for fitting in respect for a P3? I will be ordering a P3 in the new year, my LBS (predominately road oriented) has none available for test riding and once its ordered …its mine! It is therefore somewhat of a necessity to get it right first time, unfortunately I don’t have the luxury of comparing different makes/models but after months of browsing this site and other Tri related sites, the P3 is it, providing the serotta size cycle can give a good representation of potential fit. Any advice will be greatly appreciated by me (and more importantly my wife and dog!).
Go to another bike shop that has the P3 and other tri bikes in the shop. It might be out of your way, although you should ride the bike before you buy it. It is a big mistake to do what you are looking at doing. The P3 is a great bike if it fits you correctly, hell I have one myself.
It’s been my experience that some roadie shops aren’t all that familiar with tri bike fit. In fact, they just don’t “get it”. One guy I know bought a second hand P2K and took it to a high end roadie shop for a professional fitting. He came back with drop bars and a slack seat angle just like a road bike. A woman I also know had the same shop set up her P2K and they also set her up shallow. I ended up resetting both these bikes steep. I’m not a pro bike fitter, but was more clued in than they were largely due to Slowman’s and Tom Demerly’s articles. Neither of these two people were at all familiar with bikes and falsely assumed that the shop fitter knew about tri bikes.
This may not be the case with this shop, but you might be best to first read over Slowman’s and Tom’s bike fit articles and then ask the shop how much they know about tri bike fit. This way you are an educated consumer.
If you’re not confident in setting yourself up on the bike, then you can still take it elsewhere for a pro fitting after you purchase it.
The Size Cycle is an appropriate tool for sizing you for a Cervelo, or any bike for that matter. While it looks (a bit) like a bike, it’s really just a tool for finding points in space which can then be matched up to existing bikes, or used to draft a custom bike around, using the software tool that goes with it. However, as with any tool, it is only as good as the person operating it. Making sure the shop you go to is skilled at tri bike fitting is the key to getting the right fit, whether they use a Size Cycle or not.