As I write, I am on the way to Italy to be shown some new and exciting gravel bikes, or at least I hope they are both new and exciting. I’ll take new though, given my transit to and from Tuscany involves eight trains and a brace of flights.
Happily, on arrival at the second station on my journey, the magnificent Bristol Temple Meads, I spied locked up in the bike racks a fine example of not only the coolest bike genre there is – the dedicated winter bike – but perhaps the archetype of the breed, the magnificent (and discontinued) Ribble 7005.
What’s so cool about winter bikes?
If I have to pen a list of the coolest bikes of all time, then the Ribble 7005 will be near the top. As I got into cycling, I was living in Leeds, disc brakes were a strange thing that the MTB crowd used, and Zwift was a spelling mistake.
Around this time of year, everyone in my club lucky enough to have a pair of bikes would hang up the summer machine for the year, relegating it to the garage or a hateful, wheel-on turbo trainer, or maybe a set of rollers if they were absolutely brimming with souplesse.
In their place, a fleet of alloy-framed bikes would rumble out into the Yorkshire Dales, fitted with old groupsets, box-section alloy wheels, mudguards, and usually a set of 23c Continental Gator Hardshell tyres pumped up to half a million PSI.
The example below from Sam Marshall is a prime modern example. Alloy frame, plastic mudguards, sensible lighting, and good old reliable 11sp cable Shimano 105.
Many of them were the owner’s old road bike, slowly crumbling away, but the really cool ones were bought specifically with the intention of riding through the winter. They were never pretentious, there was rarely any real concession to performance, they were easy to maintain, and the focus was on reliability rather than speed. They were a statement of intent, rather than a begrudging…
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