Trek's new Lance bike featured in Baseline Mag

The content of the Trek's new Lance bike featured in Baseline Mag article is:

Almost Fast

Trek's new Lance bike featured in Baseline Mag

http://www.baselinemag.com/article2/0,1397,1618016,00.asp

Quote:

Trek Bicycle Corp: Tour de Force By Tom Steinert-Threlkeld

The Wisconsin manufacturer has cranked out a series of
'ultimate road bikes' for Lance Armstrong—boosting its
bottom line by selling to everyday cyclists wanting to own
them.

The day was sunny and warm in Waterloo, Wis., a low-key
place where a truck stop operator can commute to work on a
16.5-horsepower Craftsman riding mower.

It's 1997. Paul Andrews is taking a 20-minute spin on a Trek
Y-Foil road bike. The bike is black, revealing its unpainted
carbon fiber tubing. Attached at three strategic spots are
sensors. These sensors, affixed to the bottom bracket, the
head tube and the chain stay, are wired to a small "data
acquisition unit,'' a black box attached to the frame.

In effect, Andrews that day was taking an electrocardiogram
of the bounces and stresses his route took up and down the
hills of this farming country.

The sensors are strain gauges, and the output of that day's
ride was fed into a database of approximately 5,000 other
rides taken by Trek testers in the past dozen years. The
goal: to provide enough information on where real rides put
torque and pressure on real bikes, in order to design
lighter yet better bikes.

Andrews, who stands 6 feet 2 and weighs 195 pounds, had no
idea at the time that his uneventful ride would ultimately
benefit Lance Armstrong, a 5-foot-11, 165-pounder who just
happens to be the only American ever to win the world's most
difficult race, the Tour de France, five times.

By the time you read this, Armstrong will be in the midst of
trying to become the first cyclist of any nationality to win
the Tour six times—and do it in consecutive years.

To that end, Armstrong spends six hours a day or more
training on his bike, mostly in Spain and southern France,
to be in shape to beat younger riders eager to knock him off
his throne. He is his own engine.

But the vehicle he rides does matter. Saving the 32-year-old
Armstrong as little as 10 watts of energy over the course of
a 120-mile stage of the Tour will speed his trip by one
minute. Not much? Last year, in his record-tying fifth Tour
win, he edged German rival Jan Ullrich by 61 seconds after
2,125 miles of racing.

That was his closest call yet—and a clear notice that he
will need every ounce of energy and reduced weight he can
muster if he is to stave off such gathering competition as
26-year-old Iban Mayo of Spain and Tyler Hamilton, a much-
respected American who finished fourth last year while
riding almost the entire race with a broken collarbone.

Designing a 'Secret Weapon'

This is where the 5,000-ride database of the Trek Bicycle
Corp. comes into play. Using a combination of three-
dimensional modeling software from Alias, once a unit of
hardware maker Silicon Graphics; mechanical design software
from SolidWorks; and low-cost, high-performance personal
computers running Opteron processors from Advanced Micro
Devices, senior industrial designer Michael Sagan and a
project team of 12 worked from December 2002 to April 2003
to simultaneously design bikes that would give Armstrong an
edge in two consecutive Tours. The first, which became the
basis of Trek's Madone line of bikes, was Armstrong's
"daily drive" in the race pack, a.k.a. peloton. A second is
to be his secret weapon in this year's Tour, a version of
the Madone called the SSL that is specially designed to
race uphill.

The reason: The key stage in the 2004 Tour de France is
likely to occur on July 21. That's when each racer will face
cycling's "race of truth," an individual time trial. Each
rider departs two minutes apart and races against the clock,
without the protection or aid of any teammates. And this
year, the key time trial is not on flat ground or mild
inclines. It will be a 15-kilometer race up the legendary
1,780 meters (5,840 feet) of L'Alpe d'Huez—described by
cyclists as "21 hairpins of pain."

The ride database helps Sagan and the Project Orion team
compute "fluid dynamics," to understand what happens to the
"dirty air" that flows past and through Armstrong's always
chopping legs as well as surrounding tubes, cranks and
pedals. The data also allows the team to perform "finite
element analysis,'' showing them the exact locations of
stress on the carbon fibers that make up the frame—and where
layers of carbon fiber can be reduced.

To this end, the Orion team, which included composite
engineers Scott Nielson and Brian Schumann and carbon fiber
frame pioneer Jim Colgrove, produced a breakthrough in the
company's drive to develop ever-thinner sheets of carbon
fibers. This year, some layers of carbon will weigh just 55
grams, or a little less than 2 ounces, per square meter.
That's only slightly more than three times the weight of the
plastic that wraps a deck of playing cards (15 grams per
square meter).

It's also about a third of the weight of the production
model Trek bike that Armstrong used in his initial Tour
victory in 1999. In that bike, the carbon weighed 150 grams
per square meter.

Even this year, the bulk of Armstrong's latest specially
made bike will use sheets of carbon fibers that weigh 110
grams per square meter. But here's where the sensors and
strain gauging pay off. Nielson and Schumann looked
carefully at the results of stresses placed on every finite
element of the frame and were able to replace 110-gram
sheets with 55-gram sheets in locations such as the socket
that joins tubes together near the handlebars, the rear fork
and the seat post.

Once any identifiable weight is shaved off, the design of
any Armstrong bike then must factor in Armstrong's own
preferences. After all, this is a fellow who can instantly
tell if the wheelbase has been altered by 3 millimeters.
To provide the desired stiffness, the team will rely on
benchmarks from tests performed on the flexibility of the
rear load-bearing arms of the bike known as the chain
stay. To achieve comfort, the team relies on measures of
the stiffness of the frame itself. And to predict
jitter—the uncomfortable feeling that the bike is out of
control on a serious descent—the Trek team relies on
results of frontal impact deliberately entered into the
database from crash tests.

Out of the Tunnel

All in all, the process of building an Armstrong bike no
longer needs the aid of the Oran J. Nicks Low Speed Wind
Tunnel at Texas A&M University. By the time Armstrong gets
on a new bike, airflow, responsiveness and road feel have
all been factored in.

Supposedly. Even after going through the "wind tunnel in a
box,'' the true test is when the "rubber meets the road,''
says Andrews, a prototype technician, almost blandly.

That means not every computer-driven attempt to produce an
"ultimate road bike" succeeds. Also produced by the Orion
team for Armstrong this year was a bike designed for a
special stage known as a team time trial, where he and his
teammates jointly race against the clock.

When Armstrong earlier this year rode the team trial bike,
he loved its acceleration, Sagan says. But he didn't like
it, overall, because he "couldn't maintain watts.'' In
effect, Armstrong was fast off the starting line but lost
power over the long haul. Reduced rear-end spacing of crank
and pedals produced, for Armstrong, less efficient transfer
of energy from leg to pedal.

By the Tour de Georgia in April, Armstrong was back to
riding last year's bike, upgraded with 2004 components.

Even his secret weapon for the 2004 Tour is no longer so
secret. In his favorite tuneup for the Tour each June, the
one-week Dauphine Libere stage race, Armstrong used the same
uphill time trial bike that he will use at L'Alpe d'Huez.
This time, though, the uphill time trial was on the barren
Mont Ventoux, a forbidding peak that appears regularly as
part of the Tour de France route.

Armstrong was two minutes behind Mayo, who won the stage.
Mayo also won the tuneup overall, by two minutes over
Armstrong.

All is not lost for the Orion team. The bike Armstrong does
not like is favored by his United States Postal Service
teammate Viatcheslav Ekimov, who hopes to ride it not just
in support of Armstrong in this month's Tour but to a repeat
gold medal victory at the Olympics next month.

The Big Payoff

Even if Armstrong fails to capture his sixth successive
yellow jersey at the end of the Champs Elysee in Paris this
month, the payoff for Trek is incontrovertible.

Ten years ago, a typical high-end Trek road bike sold for
$2,200, according to Andrews. This year, a typical price tag
is $4,800.

Rolling out of its frame factory in Waterloo this year
are versions of the bike Armstrong rides that will sell
in stores across the country for up to $7,000, and
possibly more.

The Madone bikes are named after a hill in southern France
that Armstrong uses as his test each year of whether he is
prepared for the Tour. They have been given an airfoil
design that not only saves weight but stokes emotions.
Customers "like it. It looks cool. Lance rides it. How can
you beat that formula?'' asks Sagan.

Last year, Trek produced 3,800 of the Madone bikes for
commercial sale. This year, it will produce in excess of
30,000. "There seems to be a limitless tolerance'' on price,
says Sagan.

But it's imperative, too, for Trek to move up the price
curve. Ten years ago, Trek only imported bikes that cost
less than $400. Now, with increasing competition from
foreign companies on mass-produced frames and components,
Trek imports all bikes that it sells for less than $1,000.

At its plant in Waterloo, tubes are still joined together by
hand. Defects are sandblasted, then polished away by
manufacturing engineer Zippie Huxtable and other factory
hands. Paint is still applied by man, not vat. Decals are
affixed by hand.

The handmade quality allows Trek to offer customers a
lifetime warranty on its frames. But that also means the
company constantly looks for ways to raise the average
ticket price. One promising tack: Project One, where
individuals come to Trek's Web site and design their own
custom bikes, from paint jobs to frame size to component
choices. That can add a couple of hundred dollars, sometimes
more, to a product before it gets built.

Of course, its mainstream customers are not buying speed,
even though they want the lowest weight and the latest
models that offer it. "I just came from L.A.,'' says brand
manager Zapata Espinoza. "It's all about status.''

Even for pros like Armstrong, the look of the bike matters,
almost as much as its physical characteristics. "If you look
tough and fast, psychologically you're tough and fast,''
says Sagan.

What Sagan and his team may be recognizing, though, is that
there's almost no weight left for them to slice off the bike
for pros such as Armstrong. The International Cycling Union
regulates the size, weight and other dimensions of
competitive bikes, much the way the United States Golf
Association and The Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St.
Andrews do for golf equipment. The minimum weight of a road
bike eligible to compete in the Tour de France is 14.96
pounds. The latest effort by the Orion team for Armstrong
weighs a couple of tenths of a pound above the minimum,
Sagan estimates.

The Holy Grail? A 2-pound frame. In practicality, that can
be achieved today, thanks to the arrival of 55-gram carbon
fiber sheets and the element analysis that can constantly
identify points of least stress. But the effort to break
that barrier will proceed carefully. "There would come a
point where [the frame] is unreliable,'' says Sagan. "We
might not be able to do much [more].''

Trek Bicycle Corp. Base Case Headquarters: 801 Madison St.,
Waterloo, WI 53594 Phone: (920) 478-2191 Web site:
www.trekbikes.com Business: Bicycle manufacturer Design
Technology Officer: Michael Sagan, senior industrial
designer Financials: Privately held. Estimated 2003 sales of
$500 million (OneSource Information Services). Challenge:
Design and make bicycles in America at a profit. Baseline
Goals: Raise average ticket price of a high-end bicycle
beyond $5,000. Reduce weight of frame, to two pounds. Help
Lance Armstrong win sixth consecutive Tour de France.

End quote.