Cervelo S5

[eric]

of course, vanity often wins and they pick the "nicer" bike and slap a bunch of spacers on it).

Who will be the first to make "aero" shaped spacers?

[cyclenutnz]

Vision and 3T have done it for ages, but you need a stem that has a tail to match.

Imagine if the S5 didn't have a sloped top tube - the head tube lengths would mean the seat tube would be correspondingly huge and lots of short legged people wouldn't be able to fit them at all.

[djconnel]

Those people with spacers are far more "unaero" and the bike under them doesn't matter anyway;-)

Give people in a more aerodynamic position the best option. Me, I would need a size 54 with a -17 stem slammed to get the right fit. At least the headtube on a 54 doesn't look too bad.

Who am I kidding, I'm not buying a Cervelo anytime soon unless I fall into some money. My money is reserved elsewhere.

Not necessarily true. I raised my handlebars, checked my position, and back was the same. I was just more comfortable there as I could rotate my shoulders back instead of forward

Lowering the handlebars to a point is good, but beyond this you're just contorting your body to make use of the drops.

I recommend anyone lowering the bars to put bike on a trainer, put camera on time, get on trainer in a comfortable "try to be aero" position and see how much back angle changed with lower bars. Huge drop looks cool but it's not necessarily more aero.

Example: compare and contrast shoulders:




Schleck has more drop but his shoulder are rotated forward, putting strain on his upper back.

[delonaBianchi]

Low front end looks way better to me. I've just built a 58cm Cervelo R5 VWD for my brother. I just can't see why Cervelo insists on using such long headtubes these days. For a sportif bike like the old Cervelo RS, then it's underestandable, but not on their 'race' bikes.

Hi am new to this forum, was looking to put one of these together myself, but was a bit worried about the rear wheel bringing up grit from the road and damaging the down tube, or does it just look closer than it is, have never seen one in the flesh, it's one of these or the R3.