There is something very, very offensive about this.
For god’s sake, put some drops back on it and race it on the velodrome!
And a poo-coloured HED3 wheel WTF?!
http://www.flickr.com/photos/raphacc/sets/72157608078549484/
That has to be a joke.
Lucky that brake is hidden or else that thing would look ugly!
I think we’d be surprised.
These RAPHA guys have a lot to answer for.
Ja, I was going to say, it’s related to that http://www.rapha.cc crowd…
I especially love his musings on the correct colour of gloves for cycling: http://www.flickr.com/photos/raphacc/2947232954/in/set-72157608078549484/
i quite like it, not the hed, but the rest. it’s cool to see someone doing something that isn’t borrowing from vintage track cycling or BMX culture, it’s more forward looking.
Oh, i like the bike. Just not everything else that comes with it.
I just can’t see how you would functionally use this bike. Is it meant to be ironic- frame designed to go superfast, yet riser setup that makes you go super slow?
I mean everybody would laugh at you, and fair enough.
First thing I saw there was the Belgian Knee Warmers.
Made me think of Dr Evil saying “And he claimed to have invented the Belgian Knee Warmer…”
i think both design functions would even out to a “brisk scuttle”
Aren’t people riding around right now with risers and whatnot on the finest superfast superhot track racing bikes from the eighties? What’s the difference? Seems to me we’ve just moved up to the nineties is all.
Who here rides a superhot track bike from the 80’s out of interest? :roll:
But riding a Corima carbon fibre track frame on the street is another league altogether. It’s like driving a Ferrari on a dirt road- sure you can do it, but it’s completely inappropriate and stupid.
I know these Rapha dudes built this bike as a sort of tongue-in-cheek conceptual piece. But god, it just screams of ‘rich douchebags with too much money and no sense’.
maybe there’s not long till RAPHA bring out a version of these in brown leather.
If you read it again it actually looks like a statement relating to stock arriving 
i’m tired of people saying hipster, theyre all just people and we’re all along the same continuum of the “wanna be cool” mindset.
and yeah, this is another step along the way of riding fixed gear bikes. but that hed wheel is built for the road and the corima cougar -or whatever it was called- is an almost identical frame and people have ridden them on road forever. and he looks like he’s got a road, maybe even steel, fork in there too. a lot of the light guage track specific tube sets that are used on steel track bikes would implode long before that frame gave even a groan.
since when do risers make you slow on the street? the brake is right there, easy to reach and i’m sure he holds onto the bars where the designers thought people would hold on to them… which is more than i can say for people loving massive drops and riding the tops… “getting aero” and then moving all over the place to get to their brake if something pops up isnt my idea of clever riding either. the drop isnt as dumb as a lot of of drop barred bikes. The HED wheel is actually a fast and strong wheel, he painted it a colour that he likes, so you wanna judge his style points by the colour he chose? pfft.
and so someone has shit loads of cash to spend on a fixed gear street bike… wow, thats new. I think its rich to say “hey lets take this from a bunch of dudes training in winter on road bikes with a fixed gear” to “lets all rad-up some track bikes and ride them on the street” but then say “hey thats too fucking far man… riding a nice track frame on the street is inappropriate and stupid”. fuck the velodrome, the street is what most people buy track bikes for now… and its actually why this forum exists. i cant blame him for not wanting to go round in circles over and over. check ryan bailey’s wicked tan if you want to see what riding around a velodrome does for your vitamin D levels.
anyway, my point is, i hate the word hipster. and people spending a lot on track bikes for street riding isnt new or bad.
I’m a lot of this contradicts stuff that i’ve said before, but so what 
and the dude reminds me a lot of geroge michael.
the whole track bike on the road scene is now gay, dont try to draw a line and make one side pure/real and one side “hipster”… the people who used to do it have (i guess) already had enough of dicks like us disecting it to death and moved onto something else, then maybe they thought it had washed over and got back aboard their track bikes, only to find that another wave of knobs is starting to become interested and becoming more obsessive about things. it must be frustrating.
+1
But those gloves reek of ‘hipster’. 
JP, it’s been a while!
This thread is game, set, match JP I think…
It is only frustrating if you care about the image/cool factor/having a silly sense of owning fixed culture/whatever.
I love riding fixed. I don’t give a toss and I suspect like-minded people feel the same way too.
That is all.
Des