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TECH NEWS

Just in: GT Tachyon 1.0

Sub-£1000 fitness/commuter bike with a need for speed

This sleek-looking beast is GT’s top fitness/commuter bike and, coming in just shy of the £1,000 mark, you can get one tax-free through your employer on the government’s Cycle to Work Scheme.

You know what a Tachyon is, right? No? Allow us… we’ve done some research*. A Tachyon, ahem, is a subatomic particle – a hypothetical one – that moves faster than light. And while you might not get quite that pace aboard the GT, this is a bike that’s clearly built for zipping around at speed.

The frame is aluminium with hydroformed top and down tubes – and very elaborately sculpted they are too. You get braze-ons for attaching both mudguards and a rear rack while the carbon-legged fork, like the frame, comes with V-brake bosses that accommodate Tektro RX-3 brakes.

You get some real high-quality components here. The rear mech, for example, is Shimano Ultegra. Yeah, Ultegra, That’s the kind of standard you get on a very good road bike. We’ve always got on well with Shimano’s R500 wheels too. With good quality bearings, they’ll go on for ages if you treat them right.

The triple chainset (50/39/30T) matched up to a 10-speed 12-25T cassette should get you up pretty much anything without too much fuss while Kenda’s 700x28c Kiniption tyres will keep you rubber-side down even when the roads are greasy. We like the look of GT’s Dual Density grips too. They really fill your palms to spread the pressure and we’re hoping that the diddy bar ends are as comfy as appearances suggest too.

Right, that’s yer lot for now. We’re not telling you another thing until we’ve actually put the Tachyon to the test. We’re off to play in the traffic.

* Okay, we looked it up on Wikipedia.

Mat has been in cycling media since 1996, on titles including BikeRadar, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike, What Mountain Bike and Mountain Biking UK, and he has been editor of 220 Triathlon and Cycling Plus. Mat has been road.cc technical editor for over a decade, testing bikes, fettling the latest kit, and trying out the most up-to-the-minute clothing. We send him off around the world to get all the news from launches and shows too. He has won his category in Ironman UK 70.3 and finished on the podium in both marathons he has run. Mat is a Cambridge graduate who did a post-grad in magazine journalism, and he is a winner of the Cycling Media Award for Specialist Online Writer. Now over 50, he's riding road and gravel bikes most days for fun and fitness rather than training for competitions.

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2 comments

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Fish_n_Chips | 13 years ago
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Some people like the hybrid design.

I thought Tachyons could travel faster than the speed of light?

 26

Ref: Star Trek episode...  3

Avatar
jezzzer | 13 years ago
0 likes

those big tubes make it look like a mountain bike. and quite an ugly one at that.

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