Urban racers

When browsing the shelves for a helmet, I couldn't help glancing at the bikes. Mmmmhhh. Nice.


There is an interesting segmentation of the market:

• mountain bikes (26' wheels, full suspension or hard-tail, different specialities such as downhill etc),


• road bikes (race, cyclo-cross),


• cross-bikes (usually 700 tires 28'', MTB components and hard-tail),


• urban racer


• City Bikes (for wimps and once-a-year bikers),


• Traveler / Touring / Trekking bikes sometimes 26'' mostly 28'' wheels,


• folding bikes, bmx and so on so forth.

"My" category is urban racer / street racer or as the Germans call it "Fitness Bikes". Basically a road racer with a flat MTB-like handle ba and race bike components although the brakes are sometimes based on race technolgy or MTB V-brakes. Hmmmpphhh. Got it. Well, took me more than 1moment to understand the differences ;-)

Nearly all bikes nowadays use aluminium frames, some even carbon frames. Weights are easily below 10kg for 500plus Euro, wow. Few years ago those were incredibly expensive. Brakes are fantastic, V-brakes, disc brakes, next they probably introduce ABS and ESP. One interesting bike, the Corratec Shape B-Drive 8 uses a belt drive instead of a chain. Unfortunately Corratec doesn't build big bikes for grand people like me ;-)

My current favourite is the Hercules (yes, yes they still exist) StreetFit Comp which I could test for a couple of minutes. I also like the Stevens Strada line. As you can see with Hercules, surprisingly many bike manufacturers still serve mainly a national market, such as Kalkhoff, Kettler, Corratec, Cube, Stevens , Focus for Germany (sometimes including Austria and Switzerland). Very few are truly international, such as Specialized, Cannondale, Raleigh, Giant...

Then there are two interesting ones, the first for the distribution choice - only the Internet and the second for the design, it's the German Pepper Bikes and the Danish biomega.

One last thought about bike manufacturers: most of their websites are terrible with little in-depth info. For example, every bike has a maximum weight for the rider, try to find that info. All of them take for granted, that the visitor knows the differences of the shimano component groups.