bikes

VN Bike Lab: Testing Endurance bikes

For the June fight of VeloNews, we’re testing four endurance bikes in the lab and out on the paved, trash and cobblestone roads.

For the June issue of VeloNews, we quantified the about of four endurance bikes while riding modified (read: uneven) rollers.

As we did with aero bikes in the April issue, we are subjecting each bike to hours of ride interval under different riders, then quantifying the bikes’ consonant characteristics in the lab to see whether or not the numbers match our riding impressions.

In the main popularized by the Specialized Roubaix, endurance bikes are designed to take the force off of rough or longer rides. Although each manufacturer has a little different designs and associated claims, the sphere as a whole features taller head tubes, lose longer wheelbases and some engineered comfort.

We’re testing four perseverance bikes: the Cannondale Synapse, the Lapierre Sensium 300, the Bianchi Infinito and the Roubaix. Each of these bikes is spec’ed with Shimano Ultegra little groups.

Over the next two weekends, we will be riding these bikes in the cobbled cyclosportifs of the Perambulation of Flanders and the new Paris-Roubaix Challenge. (This is strictly for duty, mind you; any personal enjoyment will be purely lesser.)

Before we took the bikes to Belgium, we took them into the lab for two tests.

Our torsional stiffness examine, first used with the aero bikes in the April issue, measures lateral stiffness under pedaling lade. In addition to measuring how much each bottom bracket moves under 100 pounds of pedaling persuasiveness, we also measured movement at the head tube and at the seatpost.

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