Like every other frame manufacturer of note, Look spend a lot of engineering time and money refining the frame to be optimally light, then let the accounts department select the finishing kit. The stock seat clamp is best suited to dropping in your clubmate's saddle bag to slow him down on the hills, while this Token unit would only have cost Look and extra fiver but weighs barely over a third of the original.
There are a lot of expensive options when it comes to bottle cages, but these are cheap, simple and French; I even bought them from a French shop.
Before the Credit Agricole rug was pulled from under the team, Thor Hushovd rode the Look 585, and when he needed to put the hammer down what he had in his hand was the Pro Vibe 7S bar. As one of the few professional road racers anywhere near my weight, it seemed adequate recommendation.
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And now for something completely different; an actual 'New for 09' product. This is so new that Pro haven't actually weighed it and changed the packaging, which proudly proclaims what I assume to be the weight of the previous single bolt model. This year's is 20g lighter at 350mm than last years claimed weight for the 300mm version, and it's much prettier too.
Yet another bargain from the 'last year's model' department, the Shimano 7800 cassette may have been slightly changed to make this year's 7900 version, but by this stage Shimano are really just looking for something to do on their cassettes to make people buy the new ones. At half price, I think the opportunity to change the cassette earlier in its wear life will comfortably outweigh any improvements Shimano may have wrought in the shifting performance of the latest iteration. Americans rather quaintly call straight-through blocks 'corn cobs', and this one is straight-through from 12 to 19 before the huge jumps to 21 and 23, so it actually contains the 13-18 six speed group of our old straight-through time-trialling blocks of old, adds some more gears at each end, and still weighs less.
The Selle Italia SLR is by now almost as venerable as the original Turbo was when they stopped making it, and the Flite when they ruined it with an unnecessary and garish makeover, so it will probably drop out of the range in its present form soon. Like much of this build, mine is a 2007 model, distinguished from the current version by less tasteless graphics and a substantial discount. Full marks to Selle Italia for consistency, as this one weighs exactly the same as the 2002 model on my track bike; no marks for truthfullness in advertising, as the 135g printed on the tail of the saddle is the usual Italian bike company optimism.
An American branded tyre on a Euro themed road racer might seem like an odd choice, but I'm not standing on ceremony here and there are several justifications. First, they're cheap, being on half price sale in the desired 25c section. Second, even if I wanted to pay double for Michelins, the people down at Clermont-Ferrand seem rather reluctant to actually get the 25c Pro3 into the shops, so I could have been rolling around on the rims for a while if I'd left it to them. Third, the badge is only a badge, and the remarkable similarity to Vittoria tyres seems too close to be mere coincidence; not the same tyre, but certainly cut from the same cloth.
If you were one of the suckers who bough the R-Sys, these are the wheels you'll be riding while Mavic sort out the self-destruct button on their front wheels. After you've used them for a while, you won't notice the extra pound and a half of weight, but you will notice the vastly superior aerodynamics, and maybe wonder whether you actually want the expensive wheels back (which are likely to get heavier in the process of being redesigned to stand up to normal use)
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Things have come to a pretty pass when Campagnolo Record is the value option, but 10 speed is so last year and therefore being discounted furiously, and only Record among quality chainsets comes in the desirable 48/34 combination, so anything else would have had its price bumped up substantially by the need to buy a new outer chainring.
A bicycle necessarily starts with a frame, and where better to start than a Look 585 Ultra, three pounds of prime carbon fibre goodness from the middle of France*. Following the example, and indeed entreaty, of the Great Leader, I'm spending money I don't have on things I don't need. If my cycling life to date tells you anything, it's that the last thing I need is a high end road race bike, so that's exactly what I'm building. I may attempt to justify it later by putting on some clip-on tri-bars and using it for 50 mile TTs, but for now it's just a fun toy. Thanks to the depression/recession/deflationary spiral which ten years of gross fiscal incompetence has brought us, retailers are desperate to shift stock at almost any price, which brought the hitherto exclusive Look within reach at a 40% discount to the original 2007 price.
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