r/cycling • u/FranzFifty5 • 4d ago

Average speed. Huge difference just with a better bike?

(sorry for the long post, just wondering..).

So we went for a ride on Sunday (me M51 and a friend M63). We have a very annoying wind here in Switzerland called "Bise" which is a cold wind blowing from NE. This wind obviously slows you down, but especially freezes you to the bones. So before before we headed back home, we stopped at a road race where our friend competed (M50 very fit). From the race location back home it was around 23km and with our friend who just finished the race we rode at an average of ~25km/h. Mostly tailwind now. We're not very fast and we don't have fast bikes. We just bought Conti tires (not GP though). After the ride I saw that my very fit friend with his Aeroad had an average of 30km/h for the same course to the race location (23km). That's a whopping 5+ km/h more with headwind. Now I know he's a rocket, but can a bike like a Canyon Aeroad against a Triban RC120 with good tires make such a huge difference. I mean, if I rode the Canyon, I don't think I'd be able to go that fast. I believe the "merit" really must go to the fitness of my friend as I can't for some reason assume that a fast bike could be that much faster than a cheap bike with better tires. Or do you think a good bike can be that much faster?

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u/Whatever-999999 1d ago

They always say 'upgrade the engine, not the bike' and it's true. Spending $15000 on a road bike won't make you much faster than spending $1500 on a road bike in most cases. Seriously, the way to go faster, longer is to improve your fitness and your bike-handling skills.

That being said I've found that frame geometry can affect overall speed, but mainly in how the bike handles in certain situations. I used to race on an endurance-geometry bike, and when I finally got a race-geometry bike I noticed that I could take corners and curves much faster because geometry of the frameset meant the bike didn't need to lean over quite as much in corners and curves, so I could go faster through them without problems.