Adam Blythe's Ridley Noah SL Pro Bike

(exhilarating dance music)
- Probably the most extreme position
I've ever seen on a Road Bike.
This is Adam Blythe's, Ridley Noah SL.
He's the current British National Champion
and he's riding this year for the Aqua Blue Sport Team.
The first ever Pro Continental Team to come from Ireland.
Look at the stem, negative 17 degrees as an angle.
14 centimeters long,
and slammed right down onto the head tube there.
And the saddle, pushed back as far as it
could possibly go on those carbon rails.
Not too much really to say about the
Noah SL frame set itself.
Lots have of course been using it for a number of years
to great success for the likes of Andre Greipel.
It's that aerodynamic frame set and it still features
those split front forks which is
supposed to improve the aerodynamics.
Also hot on aerodynamics are Knight Composite,
who make the rims here.
These are the 65, are also 65 millimetres
in depth front and rear.
They claim to be one of the fastest rims out there,
if not the fastest if you believe the data on their website.
But they don't make their own hubs so they come from
a small French company called Aivee,
who make their hubs in the Vendee region of France.
Now another thing before we leave the wheels
is the fact that these are Clinchers which is a rare thing
in the world of Pro Cycling, at least at races.
We have started to see the likes of Tony Martin
use them in certain time trials because apparently
the best clinchers have the best have
slightly less rolling resistance
than the best tubulars out there.
But we don't very much see them out on the road.
Now I was just speaking to the mechanic and he says
that's he's going to try to convert these later on tonight
into tubeless, which I think is probably one of the
first times we've seen tubeless tyres in the Pro Peloton.
So it will be interesting to see how that experiment goes.
The tyres themselves come from Schwalbe,
they are one tyres that come in at 25 millimetres
here on this bike at the moment.
The groupset is from Shimano,
but it is the Dura Ace Di2 9000.
Aqua Blue Sport like many other teams,
seemingly every team in fact,
except for team Sky,
in this early part of the season is struggling
to get their hands on the brand new
flagship group set from Shimano.
So for the time being this is what they're using.
They've got the SRM Cranks down here,
it's 175- Sorry, 170 millimeters in length
so quite short.
Is what Adam Blythe is choosing to run this year.
The bars and stem both come from FSA,
as I said a 14 centimeter stem on there.
And as you can see if you look at the front here,
he's running his Bar Tape all the way to the stem.
Which I've only ever seen before on Bradley Wiggins' bike.
They just about must leave enough space
for the SRM Mount here at the front.
And his bars are measuring 440 millimetres from edge to edge.
The Saddle there is provided by Fizik,
it is their Antares model,
the super lightweight, carbon railed version.
And the finishing kit,
well the Bottle Cages here are provided by Elite
who seem to provide Bottle Cages to the vast majority
of the Peloton these days.
They are their Custom Race Plus model.
Look have the pedals here,
they are the Keo Blade Carbons
which we also see on quite a few bikes.
What have I missed out?
Nothing I don't think.
I did some measurements earlier and he's got a 76 centimeter
saddle high from the center of the cranks there
to roughly where he sits on the saddle.
And distance from the tip of the saddle to the center
of the bars here is 59 centimeters.
But, that is horizontally.
I haven't even taken into account the very large drop.
7.8 kg so, so exactly one kilo
over the current UCI minimum weight limit.
Although they will be able to reduce the weigh
of this bike should they need to do so
for hillier stages late in the season
by using some shallower depth wheels.
We'd love to hear your thoughts on this bike,
you can leave them in the comments section just down below.
If you haven't already subscribed to GCN,
it's free to do so.
And to do that you just need to click on the globe.
And after you've done that,
here are two more videos you might be interested
in watching now.
A couple of years ago I went around the Fizik Factory
in Italy so if you want to have a look at that video
you can click down there.
On the other hand if you'd like to see Si over with Zipp
doing some aerodynamic stuff with their wheels,
you can find that up there.

Adam Blythe's Ridley Noah SL Pro Bike

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