I used to be a humble bike mechanic, and I loved it. Taking something that was broken and repairing it – solving the puzzle like a Rubik’s cube until everything slotted into place – was a wholly satisfying experience.
Sometimes builds would flow with absurd ease, parts seemingly levitating onto the bike and tuning themselves. Sometimes, however, I’d cast my eye over a quote and a sense of dread would fill me. ‘Needs new headset bearings,’ the notes would read. ‘Also fit aero bars provided.’ The bike in question: a Trek Madone; maybe a Cervélo S5. And there would go the rest of my day.
Modern bikes have been smoothed and slimmed down for aerodynamic excellence. For riders it’s fantastic, but for mechanics? It’s Pandora’s box made carbon, as newer bikes are integrated to within an inch of their lives in search of aero (and indeed aesthetic) perfection.
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What may once have been a five-minute job can now take a mechanic hours of struggle, and the idea of doing repairs at home is relegated to a distant memory. Need it be this way, though? I’m not convinced.
One-piece bars
The industry can talk at length about reducing a bike’s frontal area, and slimming down the cockpit has become a popular way to do so. In lieu of the traditional separate handlebar and stem, one-piece bars are constructed for the most aerodynamic outcome. Don’t get me wrong, this looks pretty, but it is hell to work on.
Minuscule holes are left to slide hydraulic hoses through – and cables if you’re running mechanical – and God help you when you’re trying to get them to come out the other end. There are liners and tools for this very purpose but anyone who’s used these will know they are far from perfect. I once sprained my thumb trying to fit the tiny corner pieces to a set of Specialized Aerofly bars.
Internal cabling
Bearings take a beating and are decidedly unpleasant to ride with when they’ve gone rough. In simpler times, to replace a headset bearing you need only whip off the stem, take out the rusty remains and whack in some new ones with fresh grease.
Nowadays, hoses and cables are often routed directly through the middle of those bearings. If you’ve also got integrated bars, that means cutting the brake hoses just to replace the bearings. Then you have to reroute and fully bleed the whole system, a process that takes a hefty amount of time and skyrockets the labour costs.
Hidden seatclamps
Modern bike manufacturers are often disciples at the altar of minimalism. Elements such as hidden or recessed seatpost clamps can seem innocuous enough until you accidentally round off a bolt in a moment of carelessness.
You must then either decide that you’re happy with your now-permanent saddle height or get a mechanic to delicately and painstakingly destroy said bolt while making sure no harm comes to your beloved paintwork. Maybe it doesn’t even get stuck, maybe you just need to adjust it on the fly. I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a Canyon Aeroad seatpost clamp circa 2020, but you have to remove the whole rear wheel just to access it, which I can say from experience is a wildly frustrating piece of design.
Moving forward
I’m not a complete naysayer. I value the performance and beauty of a cleanly integrated bike, I just don’t believe it needs to come at the cost of all practicality. And if you think it’s an us versus pros conundrum, it’s really not – the UAE team specifically asked Colnago to put sturdier bearings in the new V4Rs because it took team mechanics so much time to replace the headset bearings given the bike’s internal routing. Compromises are out there, including aero bars that run hoses inside a recess rather than through the inside of the bars, but unfortunately they’re far from ubiquitous.
While it may seem like the dream to have a bike you could draw in a single outline, if you can’t afford to maintain it, or don’t have the time to, it loses its sparkle pretty quickly. So we must ask ourselves, do we really need the world’s slipperiest bike for day-to-day riding? Is it not better to have something more practical, more repairable, more simple (asks the grease-covered mechanic with two sprained thumbs and a brake hose sticking out of her hair)?
• This article originally appeared in issue 143 of Cyclist magazine. Click here to subscribe
