Further to yesterday’s post about aero bikes and yaw and scranial turbines, Stromm Cycles CMO Dave Koesel was kind enough to pop into the comments and remind me we’ve “met” (digitally) before, way back in the year Two Thousand and Aught Niner:
Then as now, bike companies were unveiling offerings of unprecedented lightness and/or aerodynamicicity (is that a word?), and indeed the day before the above post I’d apparently taken an in-depth look at a pair of videos from Guru:
If I’m getting this right, which I may not be, Guru went bankrupt back in 2016 and HIA Velo bought their assets or whatever:
HIA Velo is (or at least was) the parent company of Allied Cycle Works:
As I understand it, Allied is also partly owned by the Walton family, and distinguish themselves by making their bicycles domestically, though oddly they seem to be shifting production overseas just in time for tariff mania:
None of this is really relevant to anything, other than underscoring that since 2009 entire bike companies have been born and died and born again, and here I am 16 years later cranking out exactly the same crap.
I don’t know if I should be proud or depressed.
As for why I interviewed Dave Koesel, I think it was because he was at Felt at the time and I used to make fun of their “How Do You Do, Fellow Kids?” fixie offering, the Felt Curbside:
To the best of my recollection, which is not very good, Koesel took issue with this, so I figured it would be enlightening to get some insight from him on how bikes come to be rather than keep lazily making the same dumb top tube pad jokes.
Anyway, I had no idea he was involved with Stromm, and it’s oddly comforting that here we are still punching the clock after all these years:
As for Stromm’s claims that their new road bike creates a transient aero crotchal vortex and uses it to produce forward thrust, I am not qualified to comment:
However, a reader has posed a follow-up question to Dave Koessel and I look forward to his reply.
I can also confirm that all that talk of crotchal vortices inspired me to head out on the Y-Foil yesterday:
I don’t know if the lack of a seat tube creates a tiny perineal tornado that acts like a tailwind, but my journey took me through the heart of Manhattan where the streets are riddled with construction plates and I totally used the Rock Shox Ruby fork:
Just a flick of the switch and it’s as though the streets have been magically resurfaced:
In fact, with ambient temperatures getting close to 70 American Freedom Degrees™ it felt like maybe the fork was even a little squishier than usual, though I could have been imagining it:
One place where the street really was repaved was Central Park, and I saw evidence that perhaps we’re on the cusp of a barefoot cycling craze:
I hope he at least took the pins out of those pedals:
Though it is possible he’s training to walk on nails:
They say that God never closes a door without opening a window. Meanwhile, the New York City Department of Transportation takes exactly the opposite approach. After what feels like an eternity the Hudson River Greenway between W. 100th Street and W. 125th Street is finally open…
…but now the section between W. 181st Street and Dyckman Street is closed:
The weather was so good I was tempted to head over to New Jersey and take a 30-mile detour, but I decided against it:
Maybe next time.
