Christine’s track bike

Back in the UK I was lucky enough to have an outdoor track just ten miles from home. I would race the track league there every week each summer, and coach kids there on Saturday mornings. Whilst at University I raced at the indoor track at Manchester for the student championships each year. Sadly, here in Eugene I don’t have such an accessible facility – there is an outdoor track up in Portland, but I haven’t been able to get up there to try it yet.

But getting to build my first track bike was a nice throw-back – maybe I’ll get as far as building one for myself at some point…. This little yellow machine is headed to New Zealand for super-endurance racer Christine. She just finished riding her road bike to a successful quintuple Ironman finish (yes, that is 12 miles of swimming, 560 miles of biking and five marathons!), and asked me to build her a track bike to match for an attempt at the NZ 24hr record.

With the track being essentially a straight line, there was no need to worry about toe overlap, so the bike has 700C wheels instead of the 650C on her road bike (this way she can borrow some aero wheels for the record attempt). The goal was to make it efficient and aero, so there is an ovalised ISP, aero downtube and seatstays, and a custom aero fork. Chris hasn’t actually ridden on the track before, so just a base bar for now – once she has a bit of experience she can add the aerobars.

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