How America’s No. 1 bicycle company secretly tested the world’s lightest production road bike, then unveiled it the day before the Tour de France

YouTube/Trek Bicycle

Coates explained how its pro riders carried out the testing for the new Émonda.

“What they got from us were four test bikes,” he said. “They all looked exactly the same, but were all radically different. They got a form with 30 objective questions, and they’d take one bike that was their baseline, and then they’d ride each bike against the baseline. They’d then say which one is better than which one. So it was very black and white: ‘Does A corner better than B?’ ‘Does A descend better than B?’ ‘Does A sprint better than B?'”

“So instead of relying on the athlete to say, ‘I really like this one,’ we actually go to blind testing, back to back, A versus B, which one’s better, and we do that usually three days in a row. We mix them up, and the test coordinator pays attention to, like, ‘OK, well, today they really liked B for these reasons, so let’s make B the baseline bike.’ Then we’ll test against B, and if B is the winner across the board, then that one is categorically the winner.’ So Peter Stetina and Alberto Contador and Bauke Mollema and Fränk Schleck — there were probably 10 professional athletes who went through at least one stage of testing like that.”

“It’s way more sophisticated than it used to be, which is why I think we are definitely at the pinnacle of rider testing, because when I was with the team, you literally showed up with a bike and went, ‘What do you think?’ And you’d take your notes and go back and say, ‘We need to fix these eight things.’ There’d be no structure to it. Now, it’s very regimented.”