"I'm ready to get picked up," Steve Hed told me over my cell phone. The Minnesota native flew to Los Angeles to work with Lance Armstrong on the time trial bars he'll use for one of the Tour's timed stages. This was the most recent of a half dozen such meetings between Steve and Lance over the past half year, twice or thrice in the wind tunnel in Washington, once in Austin, once or twice in Spain. I was to collect Steve and ferry him to my house in the high desert to spend a couple of days. Meanwhile, I'd been in L.A. doing various errands.
"So where do I pick up up?" I asked him.
"I'm at Sheryl Crow's house."
The older I get, the weirder my life gets. Some things are best left unwritten. Besides, the Lance Chronicles document this side of Americana better than I. I'll only mention that Steve was entirely unfazed by this. On the way up the mountain his topic of interest was her craftsman-style guest house. He was a fan of the architect.
Hed thus fetched I ferried him to the compound and he opened his trenchcoat and out fell a variety of prototype clip-on extensions. These were all samples that Lance had tried, and what Lance didn't need I got.
The idea is not entirely new. One of Steve Hed's best bike business friends is Boone Lennon, inventor of the aero bar. The company Boone chose to make his invention was Scott, which made sense because Boone came from a ski background and had ties to this ski-specific company.
One of Scott's final models—Scott eventually stopped making aero bars and simply collected royalties from licensees—was the RCO clip-on. This bar featured an extension that started straight, curved upward, and then flattened out again. As Steve Hed recalls, Boone called the upward extension a pistol grip.
This particular style came and went but the idea stuck in Hed's head. The result of this ferment is the style of clip-on extension presented here. You might see something like it one of Lance's bikes in the Tour upcoming.
I'll call it the S-bend, for lack of a more colorful term (sure to emerge later). The idea is to provide a variety of useful positions, and to perhaps develop the Walser idea a bit further.
Those who notice such things might have spied a specific style of bike and handlebar underneath the Bianchi team of Jan Ullrich in last year's Tour. Karin Thurig and Lothar Leder also rode these bikes in last year's Kona race (the photo at right is of Thurig as she approached T2).
The bar was notable for its straight extensions. No upturn. The rider's elbow angle was therefore more obtuse than a right angle, helpful when pulling up on the extensions, resulting in downward pressure applied to the elbow pads, cantilevering the rider's weight over the cranks. This is a power position, and is useful at times.
There are two downsides to a straight extension. While it allows for a better kinesthetic performance out of the biceps femoris, you must crook your wrist in an unnatural position. Also, there is no good restful position according to me.
Hence the need for something better. The old RCO, spoken of above, and its pistol grip position, accessed when the rider choked up, had three problems of its own. First, the armrests were too high. Second, there was no swivel allowed in the extensions, that is, you couldn't invert and evert them (or maybe its pronate and supinate, I just hope you get the picture, or if not just look at the picture just above of inverted or pronated S-bend extensions). Finally, the pistol grip position extended too high, and the final straight section was much higher than the level of the pads. They need not be. User's choice. The picture highest above shows the Hed S-bends in profile, and one can see that the upper "flat" is the same height as the armrests.
How one rides the bike depends on many things. As for me and how I ride the bike, it would be wrong to describe any single position as descriptive of my riding style. The photo at right shows what I might call a relaxed position. In this case I'm riding on the upper flats. The utility in having these placed at the same elevation as the armrests is that my forearms can rest flat on the armrests. An elegant by-product of the S-bend is that there is no upturned extension fixing you in place. Assuming the entire clip-on, armrest and all, is comfortable, fore/aft movement is unimpeded. While I almost never leave the aero position, I'm fidgety while in it, and this fore/aft adjustability requires a fair amount of armrest length. That's why you're seeing in these pictures a custom butchered armrest which I made for myself, which looks bad but works well.
There are times in a race, usually in a short course event, when I'll adopt more of a power position. If I need to hump it over a roller, let us say, and I don't want to lose my momentum and reaccelerate, I'll choke up on the bars, move a bit foward on the saddle, adopt a very compact position and quicken my tempo. Such a position might look a bit like the photo at left. In this case I'll be pulling up on the extensions and hoisting my body weight over the cranks.
This is the idea behind an elbow angle that is no less than 90 degrees and perhaps a bit greater. Hence the Walser bars, and for others it means the entire aero bar angled a bit downward. The problem with the latter strategy is that the entire apparatus is angled down, armrests and all, and after enough time in the saddle it gets tiresome propping your arms up and in place.
There is a third position that the S-bend allows me. While I usually climb entirely in the aero position or, exceptionally, out of the saddle, I'll sometimes raise out of the aero bars for a spell. In this case, however, I don't much deviate from the bars. I'll lever myself out of the armrests, but stay a bit bent over so to keep my hip angle appropriate. I'm riding at about 81 degrees of seat angle, and if I sit all the way up my hip angle becomes so obtuse I can't recruit my gluteals.
I'm not describing a new style of aero bar. All I'm writing about here is an alternative extension bend. There are plenty of clip-ons that are made to accept modular clip-on tubes. Hed is the obvious one, and it's Hed's clip-on and its extensions that I'm featuring here. However, many of Profile Design's aero bars—The Carbon X, Carbon Strike and Aerolite immediately come to mind—also would allow for different tubular shapes. Instead of a dogleg, which most companies use, tubes featuring an S-bend can just be inserted in their place.
The way one would adjust these would be as follows. First, cut the back end of the tube so that the choke up position, or pistol grip, is correctly fore/aft positioned. Then, with the tube inserted into your clip-on, cut the front of the tube so that your cockpit position is appropriate when you're in your laid-out comfort position.
One necessity, it seems to me, is in keeping the upper flat level with the armrest. Therefore, different S-bend amplitudes might have to be considered, depending on the height of your armrests over the lower flat. In talking to Hed, for example, he anticipates offering two S-bend options for his bars, depending on whether you're using his riser kit.
You won't be able to buy anything you see here for quite awhile. Hed bent the tubes Lance is now using, and that I'm using, in his garage. Lance will get the carbon versions pre-Tour. I'll probably get mine around the same time, but I don't anticipate using them as I'm not taking my bike's front end apart again any time soon. Most of my free time is sucked up working on my own craftsman style house. Too bad the craftsman working on it isn't a bit more talented.
