Commencal acid
It goes without saying that when you're walking around the world's biggest bike show there is an awful lot of cycling eye candy on display so it takes something special to stop a posse of bike journos in their tracks – the Commencal Acid (that crazy Andorran sense of humour) is just that. This is my favourite bike from the show. In fact the more I've thought about it since the more I like it.
Commencal are a mountain bike brand, this may well have been the only road going bike on their stand, but if you're going to have one you might as well make it stand out. Aesthetics are important to Commencal as it says on their website:
"We love beautiful things, and our bikes are not just simple tubes of metal or carbon bonded together. They are the object of our passions!
Well, they certainly let their tubes do the talking with the Acid. What I love about this is it's simple, it's playful, and it also demonstrates a very high level of skill, and thought when it comes to bending a metal tube or two to make a bike frame. Clever and beautiful. Almost to beautiful to ride… almost.
Plucked from the obscurity of his London commute back in the mid-Nineties to live in Bath and edit bike mags our man made the jump to the interweb back in 2006 as launch editor of a large cycling website somewhat confusingly named after a piece of navigational equipment. He came up with the idea for road.cc mainly to avoid being told what to do… Oh dear, issues there then. Tony tries to ride his bike every day and if he doesn't he gets grumpy, he likes carbon, but owns steel, and wants titanium. When not on his bike or eating cake Tony spends his time looking for new ways to annoy the road.cc team. He's remarkably good at it.