This product gets twin awards for having the most creative and useful utility of the year, and the least creative and useful product name of the year. The name "Power Module" accomplishes nothing. The product "Power Module" accomplishes much.

I found this product at Interbike this year (2003) and as usual it was in a 10'X10' booth—the smallest booth Interbike sells. The most interesting stuff is always found in the small non-descript booths.

These M2Racer people actually thought they'd discovered the whole steep seat angle idea, which of course they did. They just didn't realize that a few hundred thousand other folks discovered it first.

These folks were all set to convince the road race market what they'd discovered about riding forward on the flats. It came as a complete shock to them that triathletes might actually have a utility for this. They might've been behind the curve as to what market was ready and waiting for them, but they were quick studies. And if they hadn't done all their homework, they were lucky in this sense: While the idea behind their product was already fifteen years old, the prouct they made was the right one at the right time.

No, this wasn't the first on-the-fly seat shifter ever made, but the previous one was bulky, heavy and—more salient for us today—out of business within a couple of years of its inception. The product was a darn good idea. The product just needed to go on a diet.

Fast forward a decade and here's the next generation. No, it's not entirely perfect either, but the four-ounce Power Module fills a niche.

And the niche is this. It's very difficult, still, even now after all these years, for the average triathlete to know with any certainty what his optimal rider position is. This is especially the case when it comes to where the saddle ought to be in relation to the bottom bracket, i.e., what the correct seat angle ought to be. The Power Module is a lightweight, easily adjustable apparatus that'll allow a rider to determine this on his own, without the need to buy various seat posts.

It has further uses. The designer intended the gizmo to be adjusted on the fly. Sure, one can use it for this purpose too. Perhaps this might be of particular use in races like Ironman Canada, where long stretches on the flat are interspersed with long climbs.

But I found it less useful for that. Perhaps if I had a bit more time riding it I'd get comfortable with flipping the quick release and shifting the thing fore and aft.

It might also be of utility when a rider has one bike for all purposes, and that happens to be his road race bike. A bolting-on of the clip-ons and a flip of the quick release and presto, a steep-seat-angled bike for riding flattish triathlons.

The elegance of this thing is in its simplicity. It's just two sets of rails, one of which bolts onto your seat post, the other set of rails replacing those on your seat post. Their not entirely parallel—sort of rhomboidal—so that when your seat moves fore or aft the saddle is correspondingly raised and lowered to make up for the difference in seat height. The quick release (like on your wheels) loosens and tightens the Power Module's grip on the saddle, therein allowing it to slide on the rails, or not, depending on whether it's clamped down tight.

Trek (TT bike), Kestrel (Talon) and Cervelo (P2K, P3) have all made or are making clamps that allow the rider to adopt a variety of positions for their bikes. This particular unit would be of little use to all those companies, as they've come up with ways to make allowance for a variety of seat angles without flubbing up the aero qualities of all their various aero seat tubes and posts. But for the user who has a standard road bike and who wants to experiment with different seat angles without having to change posts around, here is the $43 solution.

As of this writing the only thing M2Racer has is a bunch of prototypes and ownership of a crappy model name. As of next month (November, '03), however, they promise ownership of their first batch of finished, shippable product. Their website is http://www.m2racer.com.

The company also has a very sexy new pedal design, and we'll get around to reviewing that too, one day soon.