Culture

Travelling to the Porsche Driving Experience at Silverstone motor-circuit for a cycle team press launch seems a little odd, but ours not to reason why and all that, this is a team launch and a certain measure of oddness goes with the territory. It’s an early start and a long drive along the M40 to get to the really rather posh Porsche building where a 911 is blatting about on the adjacent circuit, maybe we’ll get to have a play later. That would be fun.

Italy has this weekend marked the fiftieth anniversary of the death of one of cycling’s true greats, Fausto Coppi, with a series of events in his birthplace, Castellania, the town where he lived much of his life, Novi Ligure, and Tortona, where he died from malaria on 2 January 1960 at the age of 40.

At the end of September Jo Burt and I headed out to Milan to check out Italy's top bike show. In the first installment of our adventures we looked at what the likes of De Rosa Casati and Montante had to offer.  Now it's time for another trawl through the sublime and the ridiculous (which being Italian could easily pass for sublime too) as we look at the bikes being displayed by some less well known brands and from an ultra-bling one and we've included one of our Milan videos too - more of those in our video section. 

Not even ten minutes in the door and already I’m show-blind.

Deutschland Über Halles

A walk through Shimano, completely oblivious to the Eddy Merckx stand on my left that I would only discover three days later - as they were packing up, and blitzkrieg blinged by the triumvirate onslaught of the Bianchi, DeRosa and Campagnolo stands with a sneaky south-paw kidney-punch by Cervelo to the side and my brain rolls over and surrenders.