Tech

Perhaps one of the most elegant attractions of cycling is the opportunity to be able to ride the very same bicycle that Mark Cavendish sprints to victory on, or like the one Bradley Wiggins rode to Tour de France success last year. You really can walk into a bike shop and ride away on bike that's almost identical. Try doing that in Formula One...

It might have been a slow start, but it looks and feels like spring is really in the air now. The weather is starting to get niver with increasing temperatures and the longer evenings meaning more ride time for a lot of people, and it’s worth making sure you’re prepared with the right clothing.

Reels of thread are spinning around one another in a miniature maypole dance. Follow the threads along and you see that what’s chugging off the top of the pole, millimetre by millimetre, is one continuous tube of carbon fibre, flattened through a couple of rollers. This is one of the things that makes a Time frame different.

Look at a lot of bike ranges these days and you’d think that carbon is the only material out there for decent-level bikes, but Kinesis UK’s Dom Mason reckons there’s plenty of scope left for quality metal frames.

In our 2013 cycling trends and predictions article, one of the recurring predictions is the one about disc brakes on road bikes. It's a controversial subject; since the UCI gave the go ahead for disc brakes on cyclocross bikes, many have been asking when discs are coming to road bikes. And the answer is very soon.

2012 has been a busy year, and road.cc has reviewed more products than ever before. Our team is out riding all year round in all weathers, logging thousand of miles to put the latest products through a thorough test.

There have been some really excellent products this year, and here are the ones that top scored across a wide variety of categories, we've selected our pick of the year to reflect the wide range of cycing we try to cover - so there should be something of interest no matter what type of road riding you do.

If you’re looking to add a dash of personalisation to your bike, here are 10 products that will be sure to make your bike stand out on the club run. And best of all, these are all affordable upgrades.

Coloured headset spacers

Not all that long ago, most road bikes were custom built to order by your local frame builder. Times have changed and today most are produced on a mass scale in the Far East where advances in manufacturing and production processes have seen all types of road bikes become both more affordable and more technologically advanced than ever before.