Wayne has done it! 150 miles, 5000m of climbing, all on a Travers Fat Race! in 13 hours 45mins
Great ride! Amaze Balls!
0 Comments
Wayne Elliot from Eds Bikes is doing the 150 mile coast to coast ride in 1 day on his monster Travers Fat Race...I will let him explain more...
Hi everyone, keep an eye out for me over the day, for those that don't know I am the mad one that took the bet from a good friend Tom Needham betting me i could not do the event on a fatbike. To make it even harder it looks like i have no friends wanting to do it with me so im on my own Im going to set out from the start at 6am so if anyone wants to join me then i will see you then. for those that see me and pass me, do pull up and have a chat, i do respond well to been called a mad idiot and asked why. Good luck to all taking part, remember if it gets tough and your hurting think about me lugging this bike across the country. Im raising money for JDRF a charity close to a friend and organiser of the event, im not one for asking for sponsorship but if you want to have a look at the link and pledge £5 you can then take a bid how long it will take me, the closest bid will win some prizes. http://www.howfast.org/wayne-elliott/ A bit of a proud moment for me! It taken a lot of hard work to get to this point but its all been worth it.
The Travers "Fat Race" has been out on long term test BikeRadar (and is in the July issue of What Mountain Bike). Wayne Elliott from EDS Bikes will be riding a traversbikes.com "Fat Race" Coast to Coast from Seascale to Whitby in one day. How fast can he do it? have a guess here (http://www.howfast.org/wayne-elliott/) and the 3 closest times will win a prize.
The frame is a standard medium "Fat Race" frame with proper Fat Bike tyres (no slicks here). All proceeds will go to the charity JDRF Improving lives and curing Type 1 Diabetes'. The bike will be on display at Eds Bikes until the "Coast to Coast" ride then will feature at the Yorkshire Bicycle Show. The bike will then have flat bars fitted and become available to test from Eds Bikes (North Yorkshire). The Travers Fat Race has been updated, the chainstay have lengthens by 5mm to allow you to run 29+ wheel (on 170mm hubs) in the summer and 26" Fat wheels in the winter. The headtube is now tapered ready for the New Carbon Travers "Fat Prong" Fork. The frame are available to buy and are in stock now!
We have 2 new forks to add to our line up. Both forks will be carbon with a tapered steerer plus a 15mm axle and weigh in around 600g First is the all new "Prong 29", its been a dream of mine to produce a brand new fork from the ground up to perfectly match our range of 29er and 29+ titanium frames. Prototype testing has now been completed and the first production models will be prized from the moulds next week for delivery towards the end of April. The second model is our new "Fat Prong". This will feature the ultra stiff 15x135mm thru axle. I want to say more but...watch this space!
The "Fat Race" has been away on long term test with "What Mountain Bikes" (Bike Radar) since October and the initial review has just been published in the magazine (but not on the site yet).
Have Fat Bikes just become main stream? I am very happy...read for yourself, the review is below. How Fat can you go on the Fat Race? Here are some images of the chainline. Small chainring to larges sprocket at the back. Component break down, Fat Race titanium frame with 100mm english thread bb, e13 trs double, Surly Nate 120tpi tyres on Marge lite rims
I took some shots earlier to show how much snow/mud clearance there is on the Fat Race. The tyres are Surly Nate 120tpi at about 14psi. There is 2.cm gap on either side left and right as the widest part of the tyre and 2.1 cm gap at the center point of the tyre.
Right, first things first, I don’t want a fat bike. Don’t get me wrong, they look cool and
whenever I see one I get a big smile on my face, But I don’t want a Fat bike. I have way too many bikes. Most of which, surprisingly, are working at the moment. So no more bikes and definitely not fat ones. I do love talking bikes with Michael of Travers Bikes though and watching him build up his new business, as he designs and then produces another prototype which then leads to a production model lifts my usual standard day to day life interspersed with too infrequent cycling trip masquerading as a training ride. “I tell you what Michael, if you can build a fat bike in time for this year’s Thetford 12 hour ‘Dusk 2 Dawn’ race, I’ll ride it!” “Oh, who’s this messaging me? It’s Michael, that’s nice... I like talking to Michael... What’s this? You’ve produced a titanium Fat Bike, you wonder if I’ll help take some photos of it? Sure I’d love too... oh you’ve just built it in time for this year’s D2D race... ahhhh... yeah..... Erm.... yeah I know, I remember what I said...” So... after convincing my pairs partner that I’ll be riding a fat bike, who genuinely thought I was joking, this year and not my usual carbon fibre pocket rocket, I rock up in my slinky blue and white Travers Bikes team kit and start transferring pedals and saddle and Garmin mount onto Michael’s “Fat Race” titanium fat bike. It looks Amazing; I’m not the only one who thinks this. The amount of attention it garners is genuinely surprising. Cyclists, myself included, are usually snooty aloof types who have very strong opinions how a bike should look, what components should be used with conversations generally limited to “seriously you use those type of pedals?” and “What do you think? Should I keep my summer tyres on or go to mud?” Not so with the ‘Fat Race’; “Is that titanium?”, “That looks amazing.”, “Can I pick it up? That weighs less than my full suspension bike!” and finally... Can I have a go? I was one of the first mountain bikers I know to sign up to the 29er philosophy; I got plenty of stick for that but the buzz around the fat bike just doesn’t seem to polarize people in the same way. People just love the look of it and smile, try the brakes, which are no different from normal brakes, and become ever more polite as they work up the courage to see if you’ll let them have a go. I’d ridden the Fat race four days before, on a footpath and a farm road while we took photos of it and Michael’s seriously quick looking 29er+. We figured we’d put too much pressure in the tyres, 25psi, and just kept getting rid of more and more air until the ride started to feel less bouncy and more smooth. After my first sighting lap of the course I came back and let even more air out. 10 psi in the front tyre, 13 psi in the back. I’m no race whippet! Eight pm, I’m lined up with the rest of the Travers Bikes team and the rest of the competitors. I’m up for the first two laps, as the Quad bike gets up to speed leading out the racers for the first kilometre loop I get the Fat Race rolling. It doesn’t stop rolling while I’m on course the entire night. I have ridden the Dusk 2 Dawn race four times now, and have fallen off every single race, buckling a wheel so badly it only just rotated in the fork in one wet race, sliding through mud in other and slipping on loose sand in others still. This is on my tried and tested race bike or my trusty single speed remember, it is the first day I have ridden the ‘Fat Race’ in anger and for the entire race I put my foot down once, just as I go into a corner a little too hot before a technical section. That’s it... one dab. I throw it with more and more conviction as my body gets more and more tired as the night wears on and it sticks, it sticks! I jokingly said that I wanted to cause mayhem on the course. What I thought would happen was that people would laugh so hard that they would fall off their bikes as they passed me. Now don’t get me wrong, racing as a pair I got passed plenty, going uphill mainly but that all changed in the technical sections. Particularly the technical sections downhill, once you get the wheels spinning they don’t stop. The huge contact patch of the tyre deforming to ignore roots, sink into the well of a berm or grip and hold solid over Thetford sand, as soon as we got into the technical single track sections the “Fat Race” flew. More and more often I would be smashing through the undergrowth calling my line as I passed slower riders or listened to the pants and swearing of the faster riders as they lost their bottle as I just hit the next corner at full pace or was taken over a lip of a ditch with the massive inertia of the wheels. It was me who was laughing maniacally. Through the night I would have lines of less confident riders or riders running in the solo category tuck in behind me on the less speedy sections using the predictable pace of bike as a metronome for their heroic efforts, at other times I had race whippets coming passed at the end of a technical section, calling “Nicely ridden”, “Magic carpet ride!”, “Played mate” and “Nice one Fatty!” Then, surprisigly, it was all over. My teammate and I had completed the race, ticked off more laps of the course then we had ever done before and had an absolute scream doing it. I was less beat up then usual and I'd talked with more people through the night than my previous races put together. I gave the "Fat Race" back to Michael, just in time to see someone else sit on it and ride it round the field, just to test the brakes of course. Yeah......I Definitely don't want a fat bike. Photos - Lesley Pearce |
TRAVERS BIKES
HAND BUILT TITANIUM FRAMES. Archives
March 2024
Categories
All
|