![]() On a practical note, it may not be the Campagnolo that I’d hoped for, but the Shimano Ultegra 6800 has been smooth day-in-day-out. As it is my Sempre is the same size and shape, but it has a beautiful temperament with a wicked hidden soul – by that I mean you ride the Sempre for hours on end and still feel pretty good at the end, but by ‘eck does it shift if you put your mind to it.Ĭoming back to my lucky mate, why didn’t you get a TCR… or a Sempre? ![]() It cost £15,000 and would have been lovely for a day (or two?) until it either broke (because it was so highly strung that the local roads would have hurt it) or it threw me in a ditch (again because it was so highly strung that my reflexes couldn’t cope with the potential performance). To check the sizing of the Sempre, I took a spin on a blinged-up Oltre. So before you build a shortlist of bike options around Sportif bikes, take a good hard look at the race bikes. The Sempre hasn’t got a noticeably slopey frame or a high head-tube, instead it’s just dead racy. The point is, my Sempre is a mirror of the geometry that Bianchi use for the Oltre and that’s the bike that they supply to the pro-tour teams. When you look at the miles our fathers were doing every week as they commuted to work on ‘old-fashioned’ racers with flat top-tubes, you have to wonder how they made it to a respectable child-rearing age… unless of course those bikes weren’t as bad as we’re now being told. The thing is we’ve been riding and tweaking bikes for over a hundred years, and there’s not a lot to change really. Over the past few years road bike hype has been reinvented by the sportif, and there’s enormous pressure on non-pro cyclists to get a ‘sportif’ bike… I know, one of my close friends is a victim of Giant’s Defy hype. ![]() ![]() In fact the Sempre has proven to be more comfortable than its predecessor the Cannondale R700. Nine months in with the Bianchi Sempre Pro and I’m feeling rather smug… I’ve not had any mechanical issues, the bike still runs like a dream and, most importantly, I’ve not turned into a hunchbacked mutant. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
January 2023
Categories |