Just What Is Road Feel?

The Felt F1

When I review a bike, I tend to hit the “road feel” aspect of a bike’s ride pretty hard. I’ve done it enough and gotten enough subsequent questions about just what I mean and what I value that it seems high time I spend devoted some pixels just to the subject of road feel.

It used to be that road feel or “ride quality” was an indispensable dimension of any bike review. Even Bicycling Magazine would address it in their famously brief reviews. Those publications that devoted more than a couple hundred words to a review tended to spend more time defining not only a given bike’s ride quality but also made an effort to assign some sort of value to the quality. I’m not seeing much conversation on the subject these days, save the reviews Ben Edwards pens for peloton magazine.

While it may seem that ride quality and road feel may be essentially two different phrases for the same phenomenon, I do see them differently and I believe historically that “ride quality” was often used to define not just the feel of the frame material, but the interplay of that material with the bike’s geometry. In a nutshell, I use road feel to address the sense of road I get based on the frame material alone. It has nothing to do with the frame’s overall stiffness.

The incredibly thin walls of the F1′s bottom bracket

So any discussion of road feel is limited to the sense of road the bicycle’s frame imparts to the rider. Many of the bike’s components can affect just what you experience. Ride a bike with 100 psi in the tires and then ride it again with 140 psi in the tires and you could be forgiven for believing you were on a different bike.

Bar, bar tape, seatpost, seat and tires will all affect road feel, but none of these will usually have the effect that a significant change in tire pressure will bring. Additionally, different shorts and different shoes will affect what you experience as well. When reviewing a bike, I never get the chance to normalize for more than wheels and tires. I’ve got a set of wheels I know intimately and have some trusted open tubulars on them. That will zero out the wheel/tire combo. Ride a bike long enough and you’ll even see through differences in shorts. All that aside, the most important feedback you get comes through your feet and butt.

Okay, so all those factors can skew what you feel, but that doesn’t answer the central question of why road feel matters.

 The Felt’s head tube

Handling

I’m fascinated by road feel because it is one of a handful of the dimensions of a bike’s overall composition that can affect how I descend and corner. When a bike is pushed to its performance limit, road feel can have a profound influence on just how far I’m willing to go.

People will use descriptors such as “lively,” “dead,” “springy,” and even “razor-sharp” to discuss the way the bike feels as they ride it. That feel is road feedback. Think of your frame as a pair of glasses and the road as the sky. The frame you ride is essentially the lens color of your glasses. You can ride a frame that blots out most of the sunlight to tame a sunny day. Or it can be a high-contrast yellow lens for the low-light situations you find on early morning fall rides. And whether you choose a dark or light lens, the quality of that lens will determine the clarity with which you see.

While this may be obvious almost to redundant, the road surface has a huge influence on just what you experience. The smoother the road, the less input you get and the deader the bike will feel. Some amount of texture is helpful for descending and cornering.

The inside of the Felt’s head tube; note how thin the walls are and the fact there’s no foam around the HS cups

When I first started reviewing bikes, my sense was that the changes I experienced in road feel related almost entirely to frame material, that all bikes created from a frame material were sort of static in feel. However, the market was being flooded with new steels and I quickly learned that some of the new oversize steel tube sets (such as Columbus EL-OS Nivacrom) felt different from older stuff (such as Columbus SL). Even though the material density was the same, the bikes felt different.

So why was that? The best information I have from engineers is that it was related to wall thickness. If density remains consistent, a thinner wall will transmit more vibration. Increase wall thickness or decrease density and the feel changes. Titanium is half as dense as steel; aluminum is a third as dense as steel.

But the vibration transmission is affected by other factors. Butting makes a huge impact on road feel. No matter what material is used, if the tubes are straight gauge, the bike will have a harsher feel; more vibration will radiate through the frame.

The Cannondale SuperSix EVO

Desirable?

So what constitutes good road feel and how much vibration should a frame transmit? Well, there are a variety of opinions on this. The French manufacturer Time does all it can to eliminate as much road vibration as possible; they include materials like Kevlar to make the frames mute to vibration. There are other manufacturers, such as Specialized, Cannondale, Felt, Look, BH, Parlee and even Bottecchia that offer bikes with a nude finish; that is, decals and no paint. No paint means an absence of 80 to 100 grams of material that contributes nothing structural to the bike. When you’re talking about a potentially 800g frame, that means 10-12 percent of the bike’s weight does nothing to contribute to strength or stiffness. You might as well just wrap the frame with electrical tape.

While 80g of paint is a liability in the weight department, the presence of paint does an interesting thing to a bike’s road feel. It deadens the frame. Not terribly, but it does fundamentally change just how the bike feels.

I’ve had the opportunity to ride bikes from a couple of manufacturers with paint and then with a decal-only finish. The difference in feel has to do with high-frequency road vibration. It’s that high-frequency stuff that gives you the greatest sensitivity to the road conditions. And though Trek doesn’t offer (so far as I’ve seen) a single nude-finished frame, it’s absence suggests less that they aren’t concerned with road feel and more that they aren’t confident in the cosmetics of their unpainted frames.

While I could try to illustrate the point of sensitivity with the analogy of a condom, let’s go with a stereo instead. On a traditional stereo with volume, bass and treble controls, if you turn up the bass and then turn down the treble, you wind up with gangsta rap—a pumping sound that has little definition. Carbon fiber frames with nude finishes feature a little less volume overall (because the frames feature an incredible amount of internal butting at junctions) but offer clarity that can only come from keeping the treble cranked up. Think of top-40 radio and the way those melodies can carry even when played on a lousy department store PA.

The EVO’s seat cluster

The Trouble With Color

Painted carbon can look amazing. It can also give a manufacturer the opportunity to cover blemishes in substandard work. It even offers a very minor degree of impact resistance. But it does nothing for road feel.

Bikes like the Specialized Tarmac, Cannondale SuperSix EVO, Felt F-series and BH Ultralight feature next-generation carbon fiber construction that has eliminated the use of foam in junctions where compaction has traditionally been a problem. Internal forms help make sure the bike achieves optimal material compaction. I suppose there are others using these techniques, but these are the bikes I’m aware of so far. Tap a fingernail on the down tube of one of these bikes and you’ll hear a distinctly metallic sound. The greater the material density, the higher frequency the sound. Both frame strength and road feel benefit.

It’s easy to conclude that greater high-frequency sensitivity is strictly an aesthetic preference and that one can make a strong case for a frame that stamps out vibration like ants in a kitchen. Unfortunately, there are objective reasons to seek out a frame with less vibration damping.

If your goal is a frame that maximizes strength while still achieving a competitive ~800g weight, you have to go with a nude finish. I’ve yet to come across a bike that offers the strength and weight equal to the world’s top frames that also feels dead. I’m so glad. But, God, how I wish Cervelos were available in a paint-free scheme.

A final note: One needn’t ride on the roller coaster roads of Malibu to make use of the benefits of superior road feel. I try not to push bikes to the point of breaking the tires loose (at least, on the road), but when the roads are wet, a bike that gives me great feedback will help me get down a descent faster. And as a rider, the greatest challenge I ever face on two wheels is riding in the rain. Descending in the rain? Nearly guaranteed flow state, and it’s times like that I want all the data I can get, even if it’s 100 percent right-brained.

 

Wait and See

In 2002 I got a loan from my father as well as one from my mom, emptied my 401k and sold four bikes. Totaled, it would have been a downpayment for a modest house, just not in LA. Why? Because I was stuck in my life.

I was one of the editors for a magazine called Bicycle Guide for a few years in the late ‘90s and was on assignment in France when the publisher pulled the plug. The magazine had weathered a few lousy years and seemed to be making a turnaround when they killed it, 10 months before Lance Armstrong won his first Tour de France. After that, the whole road market experienced a turnaround even a Mini Cooper could admire.

Once home, I moped. The world didn’t make sense to me. The magazine had a readership of 100,000, give or take. There were advertisers. And the publisher had a bloated payroll filled with executives that fought over just how cheap to be. I figured a lean operation could unite the loyal readers with good content. And the lean operation could offer reasonable ad rates to reach those readers.

But in 1999, paper was passé. There was this thing called the Internet and people were willing to throw money at me to the tune of six figures for an operation that would have no identifiable revenue stream. A magazine? Was I out of my mind?

I told one potential investor: “I don’t want to cut paychecks for a year, I want to be cutting them ten years from now.” I should have taken the money and had fun running a cycling web site until the money ran out, but my moral compass wouldn’t let me. Damn magnetism.

I had dozens of meetings with potential investors that went nowhere, so finally I did the one thing everyone said not to do: I invested my own money.

Which brings us back to why. I was stuck in my life because I needed to take the best swing I could at this, and I felt like I hadn’t made every sacrifice I could to make this dream real. So I launched Asphalt Magazine with a partner and a handful of freelance contributors.

Plot spoiler: It failed. (Not that you didn’t already know that).

The fault rests with me. I wasn’t the right guy. I wasn’t a tough enough manager, wasn’t a slick enough salesman, wasn’t a guy who could run on two hours of sleep. I’ve got a garage full of magazines and no regrets. That said, my greatest shock came when I approached the industry for advertising. A number of companies told me point blank: We’re going to sit out the first year and see how you do.

WTF?

Which brings me to peloton magazine. Brad Roe, Tim Schamber, Ben Edwards and Adam Reek are industry vets. Peloton magazine is not just the best independently produced magazine the bike industry has ever seen, it’s the best, period. I heard from any number of Asphalt readers who swore that my magazine was the best bike mag they’d ever seen. I’m telling you on no uncertain terms peloton is superior. From running on time to negotiating a killer distribution deal before a single magazine had been produced, they have delivered in every way you can.

But as a new publishing company, they need to prove that they can make it without the muscle of an entrenched publisher behind them. In short, they need subscribers. I can guarantee you that bike companies have told them what they told me, that they’d wait and see. Why they do this defies explanation. It’s like going to the polling place and not voting because you want to see if your guy actually gets elected.

Brad and Tim have given me more latitude as a writer and photographer than anyone has ever given me—except maybe myself. It’s an uncommon event in a writer’s life that you’re encouraged to rise to an occasion, to deliver the smartest, bravest work you can. To paraphrase Spock, my first, best, destiny is as a feature writer and columnist, and Brad is giving me rope enough to hang myself daily.

I believe peloton is an unusual magazine, one that comes along maybe once in a generation.

I’ve reviewed and recommended a great many items and experiences here at RKP. I’ve never requested anything of you, the readers. That you all read, which is proving to be an increasingly rare activity in this world, has been enough for which to be grateful.

To those of you who have already stepped up and purchased a subscription to peloton, thank you.

To those of you who have purchased a single copy of peloton on the newsstand and liked what you read, please subscribe.

To those of you who have yet to see an issue of peloton, if you like exciting content about your favorite sport and want to see stories of unusual origin, features that go unexpected places, take a chance on Brad’s brainchild.

Each new subscription tells the industry that you’re hungry for content beyond race results. Brad, Tim, Adam, Ben and the rest of the crew have stepped up for the cycling community in a big way. They’ve put previously secure jobs and their families on the line for this. Don’t wait. Don’t see. A subscription is a small risk in a dangerous world. One that will be rewarded with each new issue.

These guys burn with a holy light for cycling and after reading a copy, it’s my belief you won’t want anything so much as to go for a ride. And isn’t that what a bike mag should do for you?

Zipp 303 Mini Documentary

Bike companies will, in some cases, say almost anything to cajole you into buying their product. From suggesting women (or men) will swoon in your presence to the possibility that victory is assured, marketing efforts have been known to make claims that would be laughed off even by those who still believe in Santa. You knew about Santa, right?

Oops, my bad.

In 2008, I was doing oodles of copy work for a bike industry company that shall go unnamed. That spring, I had a ringside seat for one team’s journey through the Spring Classics. Along the way, Zipp had some notable wheel failures, particularly at Flanders and Roubaix. I was able to gather that some folks were mad of the hopping variety.

That anyone would risk their most important rendezvous of the season on as-yet unproven technology struck me as undue sponsor influence. What else could explain a situation going so seriously south as Magnus Backstedt’s double pinch flat at Roubaix?

For the better part of the last year I’ve been hearing about how the redesigned Zipp 303 conquers the problems encountered in 2008 and 2009, how this wheel is literally twice as good as the previous wheel. What has surprised me about the presentations I’ve attended with Zipp staff has been how forthcoming about the wheel’s shortcomings in 2008. They really don’t hide the fact that the wheel didn’t do the job then. There wasn’t an ounce of spin-doctoring from the staff.

Such honesty is really refreshing.

Zipp enlisted Ben Edwards (formerly TestRider.com, now of peloton magazine—and yes, I do freelance for peloton and know and like Ben, but I have no incentive to promote this effort) to create a documentary that would help them catalog the improvements they made in a set of wheels that went from shattering the hopes of a former Roubaix winner to actually helping Fabian Cancellara win the race.

At 16 minutes, it’s short enough to be considered, uh, short, but in-depth enough to be bike-geek fascinating. I can smell spin faster than I detect skunk spray, though I like the scent no better and this is as devoid of it as any promotional film I’ve ever seen.

Even if you have no interest in paying thousands of dollars for a set of Zipp wheels, the film makes for interesting viewing for anyone curious about how products are developed, especially carbon fiber products.

Check it out here.

Thor Hushovd image by Tim DeWaele