This article originally appeared on www.bikeradar.com
Diamondback is bringing a whopper of a new bike to the Ironman World Championships under Olympian Michael Weiss. Diamondback VP of product development Michael Brown claims the new Andean triathlon bike will “out-compete anything in the market today, both in the tunnel and on the road.”
“The Andean is the product of a two-year project, whereby we set out with Kevin Quan Studios to build the fastest triathlon bike on the market, with no concern for the arbitrary limitations placed on bicycle design by the UCI,” Brown said. “Our CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) analysis and unique, best-in-class wind tunnel testing at the University of Toronto show that we’ve succeeded in that endeavour.”
Wait, where are the seatstays?
The Andean’s massive frame offers a truckload of storage, from the flip-open trunk in front of the crankset to the hydration and nutrition compartments on the top tube and in the cockpit. Diamondback claims the bike is faster with the storage options. This echoes a similar design philosophy to Trek, Felt and Specialized with their respective triathlon super bikes.
The frame is so massive, with fairings extending down from the down tube and behind the seat tube, that it's easy to miss the fact that the bike doesn’t have seatstays, or that the bike sports hydraulic disc brakes. Whether designed for time trial or triathlon, super bikes are notorious for having poor braking or, at the least, infuriatingly tight cable routing for brake lines, if not both. Hydraulic brakes are a great solution.
The Andean was designed around HED’s Jet 6 Plus wheels, planning for a 24mm tire in the front and 26mm in the rear.
The frame is built to handle three water bottles, three energy bars, 10 gel packets, tools, and a spare tube — all in an aero fashion.
Notably, Diamondback is selling these bikes consumer-direct in five builds.
The top-end Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 model with Dura-Ace hydraulic disc brakes and HED Jet Black 9 wheels will be $8,069. Prices range from there down to the SRAM Force X1 model with HED Ardennes Plus wheels will be $4,779. Delivery is slated for January, but pre-orders are being taken now. UK and AU pricing was not immediately available.
Ben Delaney, Bike Radar US Editor-in-Chief
Ben has been writing about bikes since 2000, covering everything from the Tour de France to Asian manufacturing to kids' bikes. The former editor-in-chief of VeloNews, he began racing in college while getting a journalism degree at the University of New Mexico. Based in the cycling-crazed city of Boulder, Colorado, with his wife and two kids, Ben enjoys riding most days.
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