288 – Crosser

Yeah, that seat isn’t gonna stay way up there…

When fortune smiles on you, you’d better be ready to say yes.

I’ve been eyeing cyclocross bikes ever since last fall, when my brother-in-law duped talked me into doing a Cap City Cross race at Daree Fields. It was a cold, miserable, lung-busting affair, made worse by the fact that I raced it on my 30+ pound, full-suspension mountain bike. But I loved it. The atmosphere, the short track nature of it, the downright silliness… it was all intriguing.

For a very short time, Airborne Bicycles produced a disc-brake Cyclocross bike called the Delta. It was positioned to be a category killer, with a retail price of just $1200, and equipped with SRAM Apex drivetrain, FSA Gossamer cranks, BB5 mechanical disc brakes, a carbon fork, and all the other goodies you expect out of a CX bike twice the price. They sold like hotcakes, received positive reviews, but Airborne’s management decided not to renew the production run anyway. I’d be mad, but they’ve been busy turning out bikes like the HobGoblin and developing the jaw-dropping, drool-inducing Pathogen, so they’re forgiven. For now.

When they decided to close out the Deltas, I had just gotten my road bike, so I wasn’t in a position to buy. I watched the last few get gobbled up at sharply reduced prices, and resigned myself to having to pay more for less, when I was finally able to pick up a ‘cross bike next year or so. But sometimes you just get lucky. A few more frames were found while cleaning out part of the warehouse here in Dayton recently. After checking them over and building them up, the boys at Airborne put them up on their Facebook page for sale, at a price so low I couldn’t say no.

I ran down to their headquarters that afternoon to pick one up, and am now the proud owner of this rare commodity! A full review will have to wait until I have some miles on it, but first impressions are mostly good. The thing is tall. It’s taller at every point than my road bike, despite only being a 1cm (nominal) larger frame. I’m told this is normal for CX bikes, but I don’t have another point of comparison. Even after dropping the seat as low as I feel I should, I feel like I’m a million feet off the ground. That’ll serve me well when trying to tackle log-overs later, but for now it’ll take some getting used to.

The slack geometry is also interesting. The seat tube angle places the rider further behind the bottom bracket than I am used to, leading to the feeling of pedaling ahead of yourself. Again, this isn’t good or bad, just different. I’m sure I won’t even notice it after a few hours in the seat. Despite the frame being possibly a size too large for me, the overall ergos feels right. The reach is fine, my back angle is comfortable, and the bars are narrow, but not uncomfortably so. And boy is this thing ever solid! Even bunny hopping it on pavement produces almost no noise at all, and the drivetrain is even quieter than the Shimano 105 setup on my road bike. The SRAM Apex shifters are maybe a touch slower to actuate than the Shimano, but they’re also a touch more precise, in feel.

The Kenda Kwicker tires are on the aggressive side, and I expect they’ll offer superior traction in wet grass and mud. I may swap to something more durable and less knobby for winter riding on pavement, as I expect the Kwickers will wear pretty fast on asphalt. Good chance I’ll also double-wrap the bars for added comfort, and install some tubes with longer stems in them. I can barely get a pump on the stock valve stems.

So this is my new challenge, and yet another discipline to add to my already chock-full training and racing schedule. Time will tell whether this is puppy love or the real deal, but I’m leaning toward the latter.