Looks like it’s on the cards. Having read the article over at inrng broadly in support of scrapping I think I’d rather just see a revised minimum.

I guess there will be a relative parity amongst the major manufacturers, probably a few grams in it from season to season. All wheels and frames I’d assume have to be UCI approved, but I suspect there’ll still be scope for some serious weight loss unless there is some minimum limit or an increase in components requiring UCI approval.

So what do you reckon we’ll see if it does get scrapped? We likely to return to drilled out handlebars? And whatever will the weight wheenies now use as a reference for their own builds? Be interesting to see what happens to group sets too if there is more incentive for lighter weight.

2 years innit before they decide?
Probs realistic 15lb bike but add the 14kg discs on and they suddenly become overweight again 😆

So to be clear….my 32lb Nicolai is legal then?

Ever handled an Emonda SLR10? It’s ridiculously light, 4.6Kg to be precise, but it’s not exactly practical. Carbon fibre seat anyone? Tracing paper for handlebar tape. A lot of compromises to achieve a goal of the lightest production bike.

That leaves 2.4Kg to play with between the UCI limit and the Emondo, disks will take up some of the slack as will a slightly less catholic saddle and something called “pedals” which apparently are quite useful.

I’m with MrB, a revised minimum to account for modern materials would be sensible, as the article points out it’s possible to build up a bike using UCI sanctioned parts and come in under the UCI minimum weight which makes a mockery of the current rule.

A lot of compromises to achieve a goal of the lightest production bike.

Does feel a little like the big bike companies have only quite recently started playing in this area again now that road bike ranges have become so fractured. Be interesting to see what’s really possible once they really get to work on it.

add the 14kg discs

🙂

Yeah, a revised minimum or some sort of rule to say the bike must be a production model. That should stop the richer teams or companies producing special one-off custom jobs with insanely light parts just for their star Tour rider.

Although that said, the GB track squad get around the “must be a production bike” rule by offering them for sale at £20,000 each…

There was a sub 5kg full, ready to go road bike at eurobike…looked and felt very fragile.

Most of the pro bike are under the limit all ready, many have weights added or they just not choose the top end/lightest (no moving/turning parts) parts and go for middle of the road.

They should have one stage at the tour (or better giro/veulta crazy steep stage) where at the bottom of a big HC finish there’s a massive pit area with a no weight limit bikes waiting.

however the weight limit makes it possible for teams to get started and have a crack at races without being priced out of the kit costs so just scrapping the limit entirely isn’t the best idea, just lop a kilo off

Most of the pro bike are under the limit all ready, many have weights added or they just not choose the top end/lightest (no moving/turning parts) parts and go for middle of the road.

Weight’s have been banned for a few years now, can’t remember if it was a rule change or if it’s just a new interpretation of the “no equipment not required for racing” rule, but either way there’s no actual sandbagging any more.

Big Di2 batteries, alloy handlebars, power meters, cheap cassettes and chains are all fair game though.

however the weight limit makes it possible for teams to get started and have a crack at races without being priced out of the kit costs so just scrapping the limit entirely isn’t the best idea, just lop a kilo off

If you really wanted to you can get under the limit pretty cheaply, I bet you could probably do it under a grand even buying new from actual shops (not china) if you tried. And seeing as even shop teams are often riding £3k-£4k or more bikes, the cost argument doesn’t stack up so much any more.

What would be interesting is what Shimano do in response, they’ve always said DA is reliable first, everything else second, which is fine when everyone else is sandbagging, but they can’t be giving away a 1/2lb to the SRAM teams.

Bad news for SRM too.

There would h technological advantages from keeping the weight limit though. It would help with the acceptance of disc brakes but also, companies might be willing to start looking at mass centralisation to see where that “excess” mass could be put to have the best affect on handling/performance.

I don’t think tiny nuances of handling make any difference at all on a road bike. It’s 10% or less of the riders weight. They might notice a heavy saddle VS heavy BB out of the saddle, but I don’t think theres enough scope in a 15lb bike to make much more difference than that (i.e. it feels different, its not going to corner faster up alp d’huez.

Agree with that. Lighter weight bits feel better, but don’t make much real world difference IME. Making a bike feel better is enough for me though.

Be interesting to see what happens, pre weight limit we hardly ever saw any aero kit, I wonder if deep section wheels would disappear overnight. One assumes not.

If you really wanted to you can get under the limit pretty cheaply, I bet you could probably do it under a grand even buying new from actual shops (not china) if you tried

I disagree with that, however, I built my road bike up with half an eye on weight, it’s not crazy by any stretch and no WW parts really, but it came to just under 14 lbs without pedals, using a (real) 920g frame, 9070 group set, 170g bars, 1320g wheels etc. I agree you can do it comparatively cheaply, but not that cheaply.

They shouldn’t scrap it altogether, that’s just asking for trouble, it would also mean the grand tour contenders swapping bikes for major climbs all the time which isn’t something I want to see (it’s bad enough swapping road to TT or vice versa on mountain TT stages).

They should reduce the weight limit though, may 6 or 5.5 kg initially, the current situation is stupid whereby weights are used to achieve the 6.9kg current limit.

I also wouldn’t mind seeing a scale based on rider weight being looked at (why should a 5′ 55kg climber have the same bike weight limit as a 6’4″ 80kg sprinter? However it could end up overly complicated to setup and police and you’d want to avoid the temptation for riders to starve themselves to make a certain weight class a la boxing.

They shouldn’t scrap it altogether, that’s just asking for trouble, it would also mean the grand tour contenders swapping bikes for major climbs all the time which isn’t something I want to see (it’s bad enough swapping road to TT or vice versa on mountain TT stages

It wouldn’t be open season though – they’d still approve all the parts. It’s not like we’d see crazy prototype stuff. We already see people swapping bikes on road stages occasionally. I’m not sure it bothers me, extra bit of tactics.

They shouldn’t scrap it altogether, that’s just asking for trouble, it would also mean the grand tour contenders swapping bikes for major climbs all the time which isn’t something I want to see (it’s bad enough swapping road to TT or vice versa on mountain TT stages).

A part of me thinks it would be exciting! Purely as a spectator.

Imagine all the smaller teams knowing they’d have to break just to get ahead of the juggernauts before they change onto their no weight limits bikes! Froome breaks one of his gossamer pedals, thus ruining his stage win/GC chances. Real David and Goliath stuff.

As a pro it would probably suck monkey balls.

I like the fact that the weight limited has meant that other things have developed, aero frames, power meters, etc. With that in mind, a new lower limit is no bad thing to try and keep innovation on other kit.

It’s also worth remembering that this years Tour was won on a bike that’s neither overly light or mega-aero, I think Geraint Thomas’s bike was weighed at 7.1 kg and I don’t see Froome’s being any lighter.

For the massive grand tours, I slightly see some merit in allowing a bike to be a minimum proportion of the rider’s weight, so quintana’s islabike is allowed to be lighter than a grown-ups.

You’d have to formally weigh the riders though – and there’s presumably a load of ways to manipulate that. Weigh less (dehydrated), get a ligher bike; weigh more (overhydrate) and people underestimate your power:weight ratio during the race
(though at that same visit you could do baseline blood tests and drug screen samples for them all too, and those results would probably show up weird hydration as well)

If you could get “real” rider weights, and publish them, you’d get rid of some of the ambiguity in the performance figures

They should have one stage at the tour (or better giro/veulta crazy steep stage) where at the bottom of a big HC finish there’s a massive pit area with a no weight limit bikes waiting.

That would be an entertaining conclusion! Though you’d probably just have your climbers and GC contenders on the crazy light bikes from the start of the stage where they are sat behind their team out of the wind with their rouleurs on heavier aero bikes setting the pace.

The weight limit based on rider weight is a bit silly. Bigger frames would naturally be heavier anyway.

it wouldn’t be open season though – they’d still approve all the parts.

Was wondering to what extent UCI have to approve the parts? I thought it was just frame and wheels currently. Would seem to make sense to extend that to other components. I wonder how much manufacturers have to pay for UCI approval?

The weight limit based on rider weight is a bit silly. Bigger frames would naturally be heavier anyway.

so why’s it silly ?
I imagine even the same 5 kg bike wouldn’t be as scary under quintana as it would under greipel, and if greipel’s was larger and so the frame was actually flimsier – 😯

(though rather than safety I’m thinking more of making the contest “fair” in terms of what weight of gear you have to effectively lug up a mountain – it’d be different to now, but I think possibly more equitable)

GCN did a survey of bike weights at one of the races, it’s on YouTube somewhere. Anyway, I was surprised by how heavy they were. I’d assumed they’d all be 6.81kg or something, but I think the majority were in the low 7s, so they can’t be that worried about weight.

I don’t agree with the rider weight limit/bike weight balance limit. You’d end up with skinny underweight riders and flimsy light bikes.. What would be the upper limit be? Skinny Kid 55kg, bike 5kg? you’d see nothing of him nor the bike up any kinda hill… it would also add to teams wanting lighter riders to enable them to get lighter bikes.. Fat (80kg) riders like Stannard would be marginalised, possibly ostracised, out of team for being “normal” weight.

I reckon the best difference the UCI can make is to the TT position.. wholly inadequate and to a riders deficit when trying to obtain a convoluted position on a triangle.

On a note, my R5ca weight is 14lbs wet, thats more than light enough for any bike IMO.

I don’t agree with the rider weight limit/bike weight balance limit. You’d end up with skinny underweight riders and flimsy light bikes.. What would be the upper limit be? Skinny Kid 55kg, bike 5kg? you’d see nothing of him nor the bike up any kinda hill… it would also add to teams wanting lighter riders to enable them to get lighter bikes.. Fat (80kg) riders like Stannard would be marginalised, possibly ostracised, out of team for being “normal” weight.

Disagree, assuming the bikes were pegged at around 10%, you’d have to lose 10kg to get a 1kg lighter bike, 1kg is going to make far less difference than the watts lost on the diet (or the 10kg). And when you get to the GC contenders (or polka dots), they’re all going to be around the same weights anyway and it becomes lose a kg and you can swap to a latex tube kind of silliness when a kg of flab lost or a kg of muscle gained would make far more difference than the tube anyway.

Fat (80kg) riders like Stannard would be marginalised, possibly ostracised, out of team for being “normal” weight

Yeah, but riders like Stannard are there to tow the skinny buggers round GTs at unfeasibly high speeds, controlling the peloton and making meaningful breaks almost impossible. Honestly, I think they’re counter-productive as far as good tour racing goes.

Now if they wanted to set up a multi-stage tour that incorporated a few stages round the classics routes, that’d be brilliant and the fat normal riders can go and ride that. It would easily be my favourite race of the year

Addit:
In fact, add a stage or two in Yorkshire/Scotland/Lakes/Wales every year as well. **** it, let’s have a mtb stage too ! 😆

so why’s it silly ?

It’s more the implementation of it that would be a bit silly. Rider and bike weigh in’s at the start of races? Weight in or out of riding kit? What kit would be mandatory for weigh in? Then would you add or remove a bit of ballast to the bike as a result? What about needing bike swaps with a lighter team mates when you get a mechanical?

And what happens when the GC/lead rider on a team has a mechanical and one of his team mates hands him his bike? Unless they are the same weight then the bike could quite likely be too light and therefore DQ the rider.

And what happens when the GC/lead rider on a team has a mechanical and one of his team mates hands him his bike? Unless they are the same weight then the bike could quite likely be too light and therefore DQ the rider.

The GC contenders are very likely to be among the lightest on the team, so no issue – much more likely to have a bike that’s too heavy
If you really cared, make all the team’s bikes weigh at least as much as the leader’s, since that’s who’s most likely to be the “problem”. I don’t really care if Stannard gets a lighter bike at the bottom of Alpe d’Huez

The real problem will be the added weight pro peloton riders have to carry when those brake discs start slicing off limbs* of other riders and they end up wedged in the frame somewhere. I mean can you imagine the team cars trying to free Sagan’s left forearm from Riche Porte’s frame whilst on the downy bits in the Alps.

*Source: RoadCC comments section.

The GC contenders are very likely to be among the lightest on the team, so no issue – much more likely to have a bike that’s too heavy
If you really cared, make all the team’s bikes weigh at least as much as the leader’s, since that’s who’s most likely to be the “problem”. I don’t really care if Stannard gets a lighter bike at the bottom of Alpe d’Huez

No, but the riders on Griepels team might complain about having to lug around big heavy bikes just in case he gets a mechanical near the end of a flat stage.

Weight of bike against a rider is too complicated to be realistic.

TBH, most (95%+) of pros don’t actually give a toss about hitting the weight limit. It’s a non event.
More interested in fit, comfort, reliability, power transfer (or at least a stable/solid platform to stamp on) and predictability.

Quite a lot of pro bikes even have extra lay up in the frames to increase rigidity, or BSA shells to improve serviceability. Alloy bars/stem/seatpin for crash resistance and so on.

riders on Griepels team might complain

Greipel isn’t a GT team leader, so I w3ouldn’t expect him to be the benchmark for his team

Weight of bike against a rider is too complicated to be realistic.

I agree, and largely irrelevant too – in almost all cases but grand tours are about the only exception IMO. Not that hard to weigh even the whole field, or else just leaders & 1-2 climbers from each team.

I don’t really see the point in the weight limit. Yes, it’s nice to have aero developments etc. at the moment, but half the additional weight just goes on massively expensive power meters etc.

There should certainly be strength/durability tests for components to be allowed though. And when you look at the actual weights of bikes, the sprinters tend not to be on the weight limit (for the stages they are likely to be contesting anyway) as aero is king when you’re as fast as they are. I’m pretty sure these things would’ve been developed anyway regardless of the weight limit, and it seems fairly odd that you can go out and buy (for a huge amount of money admittedly) a bike from Trek that’s lighter than the pros are allowed to use.

I would remove all weight limits and let the engineers do what they want. However I would also change some of the rules about the bikes support. An EWS control on say frame and forks, maybe some other components too, so they have to use the same one all race, except TT. That way there would be a real tension between lightness and reliability which can only be good think for bike development.

Sorry in advance for lots of quotes, just want to get in on the discussion 😀

Most of the pro bike are under the limit all ready, many have weights added or they just not choose the top end/lightest (no moving/turning parts) parts and go for middle of the road.

That is a myth. It is more like this:

GCN did a survey of bike weights at one of the races, it’s on YouTube somewhere. Anyway, I was surprised by how heavy they were.

TBH, most (95%+) of pros don’t actually give a toss about hitting the weight limit. It’s a non event.
More interested in fit, comfort, reliability, power transfer (or at least a stable/solid platform to stamp on) and predictability.
Quite a lot of pro bikes even have extra lay up in the frames to increase rigidity, or BSA shells to improve serviceability. Alloy bars/stem/seatpin for crash resistance and so on.

In addition to all of that almost all teams are limited to sponsor only parts rather than being able to freely select a ton of AX/ Extralite/ Clavs/ etc. SKY are a bit of an exception to this with Froome riding unbranded AX rims for example but most of the time it’s about keeping things simple and letting the rider get on with riding. A pro explained it best in an interview not so long back when asked if a top end bike was like riding a Ferarri and a budget bike a city car. The response was it makes naff all difference because they are both supplied with the same engine.

What would be interesting is what Shimano do in response, they’ve always said DA is reliable first, everything else second, which is fine when everyone else is sandbagging, but they can’t be giving away a 1/2lb to the SRAM teams.

Reliability is still key hence why only AG2R were on SRAM last TdF. Tinkoff was very vocal describing SRAM as a big sram (shame in Russian) and plenty of Pros have been vocal about their dislike of SRAM. That said they seem to be buying their way back in to the peleton for next season so who knows.

Bad news for SRM too.

SRM have bigger problems that the weight of their unit!

Lighter weight bits feel better, but don’t make much real world difference IME. Making a bike feel better is enough for me though.

Completely agree that weight loss off the bike is mainly for satisfaction 🙂

Be interesting to see what happens, pre weight limit we hardly ever saw any aero kit, I wonder if deep section wheels would disappear overnight. One assumes not.

Aero (whole package- mostly rider position) trumps weight in almost all situations. It’s only over 8-10% gradients that weight becomes the dominant factor.

That would be an entertaining conclusion! Though you’d probably just have your climbers and GC contenders on the crazy light bikes from the start of the stage where they are sat behind their team out of the wind with their rouleurs on heavier aero bikes setting the pace.

You’d have thought this is how it would play out but Contador still made a lot of bike swaps at the bottom of key climbs (with a TST car parked somewhere obscure in the bushes) suggesting he didn’t ride the “climbing” bike all stage. The time gain vs time lost swapping seems daft to me and the cynical suggestions have been the swaps were to dump the frame with the motor in so make of that what you will 😆

Bike weight adjusted for rider weight. That sounds complicated so i can’t see it happening. Can you imagine the faff of engineering to different sizes and different weights.

Yes it would benefit light climbers. But on the bit they are already good at. So would we also allow then a more earobike in time trials where there smaller body has more drag per watt.

I can remember being outraged when the UCI started all this. They claimed that cycle racing was about the rider not the bike. But now I think they were right. I’m sure the pressure here is not from pro riders but from manufacturers. They would love to be able to justify flogging more expensive bikes to amateurs. For up and coming racers it will be a pain. For the well off Sunday rider it will be a lovely change.

If its time for a modest weight reduction then that’s fine. But the fact that its possible to beat the limit doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have a purpose. I think its great that riders from less well off nations can afford competitive kit. To lose that for the sake of the top end bike market in developed nations seems daft

I disagree with that, however[/quote]

£1k would be tricky – only doable with Chinese source parts I reckon, but £1500 is probably feasible. Mine is under the limit and cost me £2k a few years ago – but almost half of that cost was a Record groupset (I ignored conventional wisdom and put a high end group on a cheapish frame) and it also had AC420 semi-deep rims. A far cheaper but only slightly heavier group and lighter rims to compensate and you’d save £500.

The suggestion of bike weight proportional to rider weight arises from the current silly situation where a rider like Emma Pooley is required to ride the bike the same minimum weight as Andre Greipel, despite being less than 2/3 the weight of even a GC contender. Supposedly for safety reasons. A weight limit bike is 14% of her bodyweight, but only 9.5% of Froome’s – she has to generate 4% higher W/kg to keep up with him.

Of course the answer is simply to get rid of the weight limit – I’m sure her bike was pretty much bang on the limit, and would be naturally lighter than Froome’s given no minimum weight.

That calls for morphological exception rules really. Like saddle set back.

The suggestion of bike weight proportional to rider weight arises from the current silly situation where a rider like Emma Pooley is required to ride the bike the same minimum weight as Andre Greipel, despite being less than 2/3 the weight of even a GC contender. Supposedly for safety reasons. A weight limit bike is 14% of her bodyweight, but only 9.5% of Froome’s – she has to generate 4% higher W/kg to keep up with him

So you would let Quintanna have more aerodynamic bike in the time trail? Given that he clearly creates more drag Watt at the same speed as Froome

Also Emma doesn’t race Greipel. Even Froome doesn’t really race Greipel and up hill it’s still Chris that has the advantage

Of course the answer is simply to get rid of the weight limit – I’m sure her bike was pretty much bang on the limit, and would be naturally lighter than Froome’s given no minimum weight.

You might save a bit on frame for a lighter rider. But for that to really work you’d need everything light. Chain, sprockets, shifters, cables, bottom bracket, headset. Either that wouldn’t happen and the gap would still there or some one would make it and then woman’s cycling would suddenly be incredibley expensive