U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
U.S. Built Custom Bicycles in Titanium and Titanium-Carbon Mix
This is Julie’s Mudhoney PRO, our top of the line cyclocross race bike. This one has Sour Apple Chris King disc hubs and matching headset, both the wheel and bike builds done by the good folks at Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington, MA. This is a fast bike for a fast rider, and we think it came out great.
We built this Mudhoney SLX as a race bike. It has a bare titanium and Superhero Blue, modified-panel paint scheme, and is optimized for a 1x drivetrain. Disc brakes complete the ultra-modern picture.
Will all CX bikes look like this in the future? They might.
Our good friend and sponsored rider Mo Bruno Roy announced her retirement from pro racing yesterday after 12 years at the top. We think it’s best for you to hear it in her words, but we would be remiss if we didn’t point out the highlights of our time together as builder and rider.
Mo raced over 200 races on a Seven, including 31 wins, 63 podiums and 158 top-tens.
Of those, 143 were UCI races and included 5 wins, 31 podiums and 111 top-tens.
She raced 13 World Cups, 10 National Championships, including 3 wins (1 Masters, 2 Single Speed) and 6 top-ten Elite finishes (out of seven Elite races).
She was Single Speed CX World Champion, 2014, Cyclocross World Championships team member, Tabor, CZE 2010 and Winner of the 2009 USA Cycling National Calendar.
In all that time, she turned in one DNF (Did Not Finish).
BUT….those are just results. Sure, they’re important. At the pro/elite level, you race to win, and Mo won a lot. For us, there is much, much more to it than just winning, though. Mo is an ambassador of the bike. She brings people into our sport. She epitomizes what we think of as a pro cyclist, not just for the way she rides on race days, but by the way she rides her bike to work, to the grocery store, and to visit us here at the shop. And she does it all with a smile on her face. THAT is why we are proud of her, and proud of our partnership, because it’s more than a sponsorship.
Maybe sponsorship is what happens on race days, and partnership is what happens every other day of the year. Mo’s “career” as a pro racer might be over, but she will go on being a great cyclist for a long, long time, and that’s why we wanted to work with her in the first place.
We congratulate her on everything she packed into that career and wish her the very best for every mile to come.
Geaux Meaux!
Here are just a few of our favorite shots of Mo from over the years:
Photo by Brad JurgaPhoto by Chris Milliman Photo by Dave Chiu At Grand Prix of Gloucester (photo by Jon Henig)
The Overlooked Awesome is about all of the great things you can get out of a custom bike beyond the perfect fit. Check out installments I, II, III and IV.
Part V is about the future. Time, as nearly as we can tell, is uni-directional, the present sprawling relentlessly forward into the future. We get older. Our interests change. How and where we ride changes, too, our relationship with the bike.
So when we design a new bike, we think about how it will be ridden in 5 years, in 10. We make lifetime bikes, so we think about how the rider will change in their lifetime. We design in adaptability. Will a road bike become a commuter? Will a commuter be ridden on tours? Will a trail bike do some bike packing?
There are all sorts of ways to future-proof a frame design. For example, we can make a headtube a little longer, rather than depending on spacers to achieve a desired bar height. That leaves the rider the option of adding spacers later, when maybe they are less flexible. This the fit-related future.
Or maybe we’re working on a cyclocross race bike that the rider will eventually use as a winter commuter. We add fender mounts. This is the use-related future.
Many of these things are simple to do, but our experience is that when people buy a new bike, they buy the bike they want right now. As designers and as builders, it’s our duty to help them think about the longer term, and to make sure we are designing in as much value as they can get from their Seven over its entire lifetime.
Matt and Mo do a great job of documenting the fun they have on the race course and on the road, and they’ve just posted their 2014/15 Cyclocross Season Wrap Up.
Here is a quick excerpt:
Wednesday was race day #1 and I was feeling ready to go in a competitive field. The number of single speed women had doubled from the year before and as the defending champion, I was going to have a hard race on my hands.
Bounce over to MMRacing and read it all.