If you move bikes on highways, you’ve had the thought. You glance in the mirror at 110 km/h and picture a frame bouncing down the pavement, carbon and dreams turning to shrapnel under a transport truck. Then you tell yourself your rack is fine, your straps are tight and that kind of thing happens to other people.
For Meaford rider and firefighter Jason Bayens, it stopped being a hypothetical just after midnight on the 401. His dream build, a nearly new Devinci Troy, vanished off the back of his truck somewhere around Bowmanville.
“It was basically brand new,” he says. “I’d only ridden it once.”
The rush, the old rack and the perfect storm
The plan changed late. Instead of rolling out to Mont-Sainte-Anne for the World Cup on Thursday morning, Jason and his partner decided to get a jump on the drive and leave Wednesday night. The usual pre-trip chaos kicked in. Bikes loaded in a rush. Old habits doing the heavy lifting.
He reached for an old tray-style hitch rack. Nothing fancy. A budget SportRack from Canadian Tire that had done serious mileage over the years. South Carolina. The East Coast. Highlands. No problems.
“I’ve used that old bike rack lots of times and never had an issue,” he says.
He loaded Heather’s e-bike closest to the truck because of the weight. The new Troy went on the outside. That was strike one.
Strike two was the frame. The Troy’s steep, sloping top tube sat in the cradle at just the wrong angle. Later, in the shop, Jason realized he could roll the bike sideways out of the clamp without it biting any harder. The geometry simply did not play nice with that style of rack.
Strike three was love. To protect the fresh paint, he wrapped the top tube in a soft microfiber. And for once he skipped the usual cable lock through the frames.
“I didn’t want that bouncing around against the frame for eight hours,” he says. “I didn’t want to scratch it.”
You can see where this is going.
The midnight wave
They stopped for fuel in Collingwood. He checked the rack. Everything looked fine. Back on the road. The sky was black. The highway was busy. Cruise contraol was set.
Then a van eased up beside them, hazards on, people waving hard to the shoulder.
“Immediately I assumed either we were getting robbed or something was actually wrong,” he says.
He stepped out, glanced back and felt his stomach drop. The rack was there. Heather’s bike was there….
Click Here to Read the Full Original Article at Canadian Cycling Magazine…