The title of this blog is a blatant ripoff of the IQ-reducing show "E True Hollywood Stories," but I promise that's where the similarities end. I wanted to come up with a thematic idea that would carry me through at least a few entries, and I decided that it might be pretty cool to tell the "story" behind some of the bikes. Catalog space is limited, dealers have - understandably - a different agenda when they talk to you about bikes than sharing the nuances of design history, and questions like "what's the headtube length" or "what cranks come on that bike" are the primary questions that most folks want answered when they peruse Specialized.com. But here on IAmSpecialized.com, things are a bit more casual. And so I pressured some folks on the engineering team to sharing some of their thoughts when designing the bikes that finally made it to the showroom floor.

The first bike covered is, to me, one of the most interesting bikes that Specialized makes, simply because it's a extremely capable bike at an extremely reasonable price. You'll recall, I hope, one of my first posts on this site - "Why Triathletes *NEED* a Road Bike." And I think the Allez, at $550 for a Comp frameset and $1400 for the very capably equipped Allez Comp Compact M2 complete bike, answers the call mightily, even for the most frugal of triathletes. But what makes the Allez so interesting is not just that it's a reasonably priced road bike. It's that it's a very well engineered reasonably priced road bike. I sat down, figuratively speaking though we were both seated at the time just not in the same place, with Mark Cote, the man behind the most recent re-engineering of what was once Specialized's flagship bike, back when carbon was almost unknown outside of forks and Cipollini was dominating sprints in his zebra patterned kit. The current Allez plays second fiddle to the Tarmac as a race-bike, but not by nearly as much as the price points ($2900 for the Tarmac SL3 frameset) would indicate.

Cote emphasized to me that "trickle down of advancements" is an inevitable part of any technological industry, and it's especially ingrained at Specialized. The former ne plus ultra of composites engineering - the Tarmac SL2 - is now found as part of a $2000 complete bike in the Tarmac Elite. Component makers have followed that same path. Cote said that SRAM's wide-range compact Apex groupset (what's appropriately spec'ed on the Allez) and it's cousin - Rival - as well as Shimano's 105 group are much better now than the highest priced groups of even a few years ago. But could the trickle down of technology make the leap from composites to aluminum? That was the question that Cote set out to answer.

Fundamentally, composites - namely, carbon & epoxy - differ massively from isotropic (exhibiting properties with the same values when measured along axes in all directions - Merriam-Webster) materials like aluminum. Without getting too much into the nitty-gritty engineering of layups and fiber orientation, let's just say that composites allow you a great deal of flexibility when designing something like the, uhm, flexibility of a given tube. But what Cote was quick to point out was that, to a large extent, shape really does dictate a large part of function when it comes to structural engineering. A really large diameter composite tube is going to be quite resistant to bending. And a really large diameter aluminum tube is as well. So Cote set out to see how much of the SL3's performance he could trickle down by simply duplicating the SL3's tube shapes - hence the remarkable visual similarities between the Allez and the SL3 - and then simply tuning wall thicknesses to get the performance metrics he wanted.

Ultimately, the answer to the question of "how much?" was an emphatic, "A LOT!" For roughly a 400g (or approximately 1lb.) weight increase (obviously dependent on the size of the frame), Cote was able to design a bike that was actually 1% stiffer torsionally (what most people take a shine to when cornering and descending) than the current premier road bike offering, the SL3, and significantly stiffer than the SL2. Giving up the OSBB standard in favor of a threaded bottom bracket and, according to Cote, some slight room for improvement in chainstay design results in marginally less bottom bracket stiffness than the SL3, but it's still more than stiff enough for even the mightiest crit racer. Cote felt that with some tweaks to the chainstays and dropouts, he might even be able to come closer to the SL3's stiffness there as well. But that's a project for the future, though it does give some insight into the "never satisfied" mentality of the engineering team.

I asked Cote why he wasn't worried about cannibalizing sales of the higher end bikes. I almost felt like I was the keeper of what should have been a secret. I ride an SL3, and I'm reminded almost daily that the bike far exceeds my skill level. I'm certain that, even watching the Grand Tours, that the very best bikes exceed the abilities of even the best bike riders. A bike like the Allez would be way more bike, from a performance standpoint, than the vast majority of riders would ever need. But Cote was more than happy to share. "Any time you can make a better bike - at any price point - you have to do it." Alrighty then...

There will always be folks who want the pinnacle of performance, but especially for triathletes, where a road bike is really just a workhorse - though a workhorse that is missing from far too many stables - the Allez is the bike that fits the bill perfectly. It's a bike that can do anything and everything, except for breaking the bank.

Isn't engineering wonderful?