“The craziest bike build you’ve never seen”: A 4.8kg hill-climbing dream, plus Met launches Pogačar’s Tour-winning lid, new stuff from Silca and Oakley + more

It’s Christmas Eve for pain-loving hill climbers here in the UK, Sunday seeing the latest running of the British National Hill Climb Championships. Defending men’s champ Harry MacFarlane is pulling out all the stops to keep his title for another year and has gone to great lengths to get his ride for Sunday’s Bank Road ascent in Matlock as light as possible. There’s light and then there’s 4.8kg…

“The craziest bike build you’ve never seen”

While all-conquering hill-climbing queen Illi Gardner might just be speedy enough up climbs to win Sunday’s crown on a mountain bike, men’s champ Harry MacFarlane is ramping things up in his quest to defend his title.

Ramping things up, but cutting that weight down — all the way to 4.8kg… “Less than the average house cat,” MacFarlane jokes in the YouTube video detailing how he built this hill-climber’s dream. There’s a disappointing lack of “F**k the UCI” graffiti on his bike this year [see last year’s below], but maybe he’s saving that for the big day.

It does however have a bonded stem and handlebar. No, not an integrated cockpit, a separate stem and bar fused together by a carbon expert in the name of weight saving. Elsewhere, there’s a prototype hexagonal chainring that, in the nicest way possible, looks straight off the scrapheap, AliExpress lights that weight less than a gramme each, a “Frankenstein saddle”, 770g wheels, and his name cut out of the frame. 

It all started with an old 56cm Trek Émonda SLR frame bought off eBay for £483, sanded down and carbon experts from C Technique then doing some fun stuff to get that weight tumbling, not least by making an integrated bar and stem… from a bar and stem (plus some extra carbon).

Then there’s the ‘MAC’ cut out of the frame, showing off some more carbon put into the frame beneath.

“Why? Well, because we can,” MacFarlane explained.

The carbon experts also removed all the unused holes and filled them with carbon. The groupset is SRAM Red eTap 11-speed and has a 38t chainring up front and a 30t cassette. Sandpaper on the shifters for marginal gains, and all that.

Talking of marginal gains, we’ll let the defending hill-climbing champion explain the thinking behind the prototype Spreng Reng hexagonal chainring: “Designed not just to help with dead spots, like an oval chainring, but also actually improve the power phase of your pedal stroke”.

It all comes to a mad 4.59kg without pedals and 4.84kg with Favero’s power meter pedals. Will it be enough to beat Andrew Feather and his 5.4kg disc brake build [below] on Sunday?

Pogačar’s top-secret lid, the Met Trenta 3K Carbon, now officially launched to the public

We say ‘top-secret’, can a helmet used to win the Tour de France and women’s Giro d’Italia be that under wraps? Probably not, but Met’s new Trenta 3K Carbon is now officially available to the public.

The helmet brand claims this version is 40 per cent safer, which seems a somewhat subjective thing to put a percentage figure on, but is apparently backed up by independent lab testing for linear and rotational impacts. As such, it earned a five-star rating by the renowned Virginia Tech team,

Unsurprisingly, it was developed in collaboration with Pogačar and UAE Team Emirates, Met saying it now has 16 per cent more ventilation thanks to “a reworked internal geometry and optimised air channelling, engineered within Met’s proprietary wind tunnel.

It’s priced at £350 and weighs 260g for a size medium.

Close up with those fancy Oakley x Meta shades that can record your rides and integrate with Strava and Garmin

Earlier this week I headed to Oakley HQ to take a look at the new £499 “performance AI glasses”. We’re getting a pair in for review soon so we’re really looking forward to giving them a proper test.

Designed with social media and tech giants Meta, the glasses have a built-in 3K camera. That’s voice-activated and the glasses can also integrate with Strava and Garmin to display live data into your eyes and ears via the Prizm lenses and open-ear speakers. Very fancy… and pricey.

Are coloured tyres properly back, then? 

These would certainly make a statement on the club run. Vittoria is marking Jonas Vingegaard’s Vuelta win with the same red version of its Corsa Pro tyre that the Dane used on the final stage of this year’s race. It’s tubeless-ready, only available in 28mm and will set you back €95.95 (£84) per tyre, so just the £170 to paint the town red.

Silca Ultimate TPU tubes are “fast enough to offer a serious alternative to tubeless”

Running TPU tubes for performance or because they are easily packable? Silca has a new one out, its Ultimate TPU tube, weighing just 44g for a 24-43mm version with 50mm valve. When packed down that’s just 3.9cm x 7.7cm x 2.5cm. Silca is also confident it is “fast enough to offer a serious alternative to tubeless”, the tube half the weight on a butyl product. 

One downside is obviously the price, these Silca tubes £39. Another commonly heard downside of TPU is that you can have problems with electric pumps, which tend to get quite hot when inflating. In fact, a reader got in touch just yesterday morning to tell us about the woes they had with an electric pump causing damage to another brand’s TPU tubes, meaning they were going back to CO2 canisters.

Silca says it has an answer for that however, and recommends you inflate its new TPU tube in 15 PSI steps to allow heat dissipation. Check out all the details here.

One way to make indoor training more bearable this winter — ride with Wout van Aert

The clocks go back tonight which means your rapidly darkening evening rides are about to become pitch black for the next few months here in the UK. Many will be turning to their turbo trainers in the coming weeks, digging out that winter kit or finding excuses not to take the bike out all — don’t tell the cycling police, but I even went running on Thursday…

Indoor training platform Rouvy has announced another series of virtual rides with pro riders, including Wout van Aert. Rouvy tells us more than 6,500 people from around the world registered for a similar virtual group ride with Van Aert earlier this year, so they’re running it back and kicking off the indoor-training season with another Van Aert x Rouvy ride on 30 October.

There’ll be a live Q&A and it will start at 5pm UK time, using Rouvy’s 23.1km Tenerife Pico del Teide route, one of its many real-world routes. Rouvy users can sign up here, and the brand tells us to expect more virtual rides with Visma-Lease a Bike and Lidl-Trek pros in the near future.

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