If you were to drop into the SIC Speed Shop or take a look around the website in the coming weeks, you might spot some sneek peeks of our entirely new 2015 line up of Speed Metal, starting off with the successor to the Lightning X, our highly regarded high performance titanium road frame. More news and full details on the X-1, the all-new Spitfire and more is heading to an interweb enabled device, print magazine, or bike show near you soon!
You might also spot the entirely matt black polished 25mm wide boy rims on the very limited edition Koppenberg NeroX25s. We’ve nicknamed these wheels the Fat Boy Slims as they’re definitely full fat width. But they’re certainly not heavy. These officially semi-awesome mean looking alloy wheels have mostly already sold out (to Those Who Know!) before we’ve even started building them in earnest, and well before we’ve even had a chance to show them off for the benefit of Those Who Don’t Yet Know.
So we’re pretty excited about our new creations and we really think that our customers will be too, just as soon as we get around to telling everybody what we’ve been up to.
But what’s making this period even more special for us is that over the last few months we’ve been forging relationships with a very select, very small band of riders and helping them to SpinOnThese. And these.
In the past we’ve sponsored and supplied equipment to elite men’s road race teams. We learnt a great deal through these experiences, and we’ve put a lot of what we learnt into improving our product design and engineering processes. Racing truly does improve the breed.
But this year we decided to do things differently. Instead of blanket sponsoring a team of racers put together by someone else (usually the team’s DS), and with whom we have no direct, close relationship, we decided to seek out individual riders to work directly with. And we didn’t just want to limit ourselves to the usual suspects. We wanted riders from a wide age and experience range, and riders that we felt were truly worth the limited help we as a small bike company can afford to give.
It’s now May and we’ve managed to form an interesting bunch. We have three fantastically talented youngsters, Carl Jolly, Keir Lewis and Luke Simmonds racing every weekend in Schoolboy and Junior races up and down the country. They’re all spinning on our wide profile K2 wheelsets and ripping the legs off the competition. Both Keir and Luke recently won English Schools League National Championships in their respective age groups.
Then we have Dani Christmas of Project 51 cycling team. Dani spins on one of our titanium Spitfires shod with K2 Koppenberg and K2 Carbone wide profile wheelsets, and she’s currently busy breaking into the top echelon of the UK’s elite women’s road race scene. The fact she only started cycling around a year ago may give her competition cause to relax. But this lady is as tough as they come. Some big early season crashes have simply seen her pick herself up, dust off the bike and get back on. Oh, and did I mention that she’s an elite international runner and former Commonwealth Youth 800m champion? We think Dani has what it takes, and we’re really proud to have her racing our machines.
And finally, there’s a couple of new members joining the team too. Unconventional, international kind of members. More on these guys to follow in the next update.
In the meantime, good luck to a couple of founder members of the SAS (that’s the Spin All Stars for Those Who Don’t Yet Know) Neil and Sol who are riding their second consecutive Fred Whitton torture-fest this weekend. The weather looks grim as usual. Have fun chaps.