Tour inspired tech from London cycling outfit, Condor who have got together with Mavic, of wheel, shoe fame and Tour de France neutral support car fame to produce the wonderfully spangly Condor Baracchi for Mavic frame.
What we have here is an early incarnation of the 2011 Condor Baracchi, Condor's carbon sportive bike, decked out in a special Mavic yellow custom paint job and built up with either 2011 Mavic Cosmic Carbone wheels or 2011 Mavic R-Sys wheels. Drivetrain is Shimano Di2 and the rest of the finishing kit is PRO Vibe stuff, just like that nice Mark Cavendish uses.
This is an ultra-limited edition… there's only two of them, and the bad news is that they aren't for sale either. Although one lucky person could get to own one because Condor are either going to auction one of the bikes, or offer it as a competition prize to raise money for charity, preferably a cycling charity. if you've got any suggestions for worthy causes stick them on as comments below and we'll pass them on to Condor.
If you could buy the bikes, the one decked out with the Cosmic Carbone wheelset would set you back £3945… which seems pretty reasonable. The frameset price, if you could buy it, would be £1199.99 including headset and fork.
That pricing is pretty exact, so no surprise that will be able to buy something very similar soon, the colour scheme, minus the Mavic detailing - such as the names of all Mavic's wheels, will probably be available as a part of Condor's 2011 range.
In the meantime you can check out the bike's in Condor's shop window in the Gray's Inn Road and they will be bringing one of them along to the Tour screenings that they are putting on at Look Mum No Hands on Sunday and then again next Thursday, as well as the Tour screening there will be various prize draws… not for the bike though.
Sadly they won't be featuring on the Mavic service car at the Tour any time soon the Condor Baracchi for Mavic limited edition is a bit too limited for that, our source at Condor recyou need to supply about 250 bike for that which does sort of beg the question where do all those neutral service bikes go? They only ever have a few on the car and you hardly ever see a rider on one. Since we first published this story Mavic have been in touch to say their neutral bike fleet is nothing like 250 bikes, they only have 33 bikes in Europe, 24 in France and 9 in Italy (see comments below) which is good news foro Condor, if they just upped their Baracchi run a bit…
*Incoming Mavic neutral bike trivia: Because there are so many different pedal systems in use in the pro peloton all the neutral bikes are equipped with clips and straps so that no-one gets an unfair advantage – although even then it must be an effort getting your feed in if you've got something like a Speedplay cleat on the bottom of your shoe.
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4 comments
Mavic have been in touch about their neutral bikes, here's what they had to say:
"We do NOT have 250 bikes for neutral assistance !
For Europe, we have 24 bikes in France and 9 bikes in Italy.
On road race in general, we have for 1 car : 3 bikes on the roof and 16 wheels in the car.
On the Tour de France, we have 13 bikes altogether (3 on each 3 cars in the race) and 4 bikes on the spare cars.
We also have 16 wheels per car (5 front + 11 rear) for the assistance."
I was sort of hoping that outside of Tour time those neutral bikes doubled as the Annecy municipal hire bike fleet… maybe not then.
On it Decster, emailed a bloke at Mavic… mind you, I did get an Absence du bureau message back cos he's sitting in a neutral support car I presume, he'll be back on the 26 though
250 bikes...WOW!
someones gotta contact Mavic and find out what happens to all that equipment????
the 'help jon build a lovely outbuilding specifically for bikes' charity would do nicely thanks!
In all seriousness I would suggest the money goes toward disabled sports charities because british cycling does get a decent amount of funding, cycling en mass gets reasonable funding through the dft and sustrans isnt short of a bob or two.