Today I spoke with the CSC mechanic who was in Qatar, and he gave me some feedback on what happened.
The roads in Qatar were the worst he has ever seen, there were more holes than road. They broke two wheels, and he used this fact as proof that the Zipp wheels are the BEST wheels he has ever seen. He said all the other teams he spoke with broke way more.
As for the fork, Julian Dean hit a pothole as big as his head 25k into the race. He says that after that the bike felt like it had a flat front tire, so he checked but the tire was OK. It wasn’t until quite some time after the initial bang that he figured out that there was movement in the steerer, and at that point (which unfortunately was a hectic moment in the race) he switched bikes with Michael Sandstoed because Julian had a pretty good shot at the final sprint.
So from this initial information I am actually quite relieved at the failure mode. Of course the first objective of design is to prevent failure of a part, but it is as important to make sure they are fail-safe. There are situations that are way outside the normal use of a product and therefore a fail-safe mode is crucial. This usually means that a part should not fail catastrophically, but that it should stay together even after failure. According to the reports from Julian and the mechanic, this is exactly what happened.
Nonetheless the fork, shim and stem have been shipped back to us for further analysis.
It is worth mentioning that one of the reasons bicycle companies sponsor pro teams and supply them with equipment (among additional reasons)is to conduct real-world testing of their equipment in a demanding envrionment, often times more demanding than what a consumer may subject the same or similar equipment to. That sounds like what was happening here, and it sounds like that test was a success. The conditions were adverse. There was a failure. The failure was contained and did not result in a crash or injury. The system worked. Once again, hats off to Cervelo, and to Gerard for providing this information. To me, this only inspires confidence.
It is worth mentioning that one of the reasons bicycle companies sponsor pro teams and supply them with equipment (among additional reasons)is to conduct real-world testing of their equipment in a demanding envrionment, often times more demanding than what a consumer may subject the same or similar equipment to.
Of course I can only speak for Cervelo, but I have to somewhat disagree with you. While there are many things that the team can test for us (and do a better job than we could do ourselves), these would be things related to new geometries, comfort, stiffness, “ride”, etc. But we wouldn’t use athletes as human crash test dummies, we have test machines for that. We wouldn’t want to put anybody in harms way, pro or regular joe. Now I don’t think Tom was trying to say that bike sponsors out there are trying to kill their athletes, but I just wanted to clarify that to me (and I presume to him as well) having riders break product is not the kind of testing that is recommendable, there are better ways to figure that out.
It is true that the pro race environment is usually more demanding than what I would encounter on my Sunday ride, but I can hit a big pothole here as well (especially in Toronto). So it makes sense to only have one set of standards, the highest, and in our particular case we have no choice since there is no difference between the pro frame and the other frames we sell. But that also applies to other companies who do proper testing, even if they make different frames for the pro team than they do for the normal market, I don’t think they use different test standards.
Further testimony to the degree of engineering, care and responsibility that make Cervelo bicycles a reliable product. It is worth mentioning that after selling a lot of Cervelos we have never had a frame fail in any way. At this time, they are the only manufacturer about whom we can say this. It is also the reason I bought three for myself (a P3, Soloist and R2.5). And I can buy any bike I want.