At first glance, this bike, made by the Californian firm Calfee Design, looks like any of the other sleek road bikes that made it into last month's 50 Best Bikes. That's until you spot the knobbly bits - it's made not of lightweight carbon fibre but heat-treated bamboo.

A bamboo bike? It's not as nuts as it sounds. The Calfee model is on sale at Eco Age, the ultra-green West London boutique founded by Colin Firth, and I was prepared to dismiss it as a cute (and expensive - £1,300-plus for the frame) exercise in eco-chicery. But it turns out there's real merit in swapping hi-tech composites for fast-growing grass - and now Calfee has competition...

Last week, Nick Frey, a champion US cyclist and engineering student, announced plans to team up with fellow Princeton University students to produce his own high performance bamboo road bikes. Sol Cycles, the company Frey set up after successfully building prototypes as part of a project (blog here), will start producing bikes from early summer.

So why, as bicycles become ever more hi-tech, are serious racers like Calfee and Frey messing around with panda food? It turns out the properties that give bamboo terrific tensile strength, allowing the grass, which can grow up to a metre a day, to reach 60 metres in height and still resist strong winds (or even support kung fu fighting), are just as useful in a bike. Lightweight and stronger than steel, bamboo also withstands compression better than concrete, and dampens vibrations.

A Newsweek article last week reported how bamboo's impressive build quality is making it the material of choice for everyone from floor and furniture makers to architects racing to make greener homes. Craig Calfee, who pioneered the use of carbon fibre in bike frames 20 years ago, reckons it's only a matter of time before the grass turns up on race circuits.

Indeed, Nick Frey has already raised eyebrows with wooden (and winning) performances on his bamboo bike, leaving carbon-fibred competitors in his wake. Riding one, he told Newsweek, "is like wearing comfortable loafers and having the efficiency of track spikes."

And you can be sure that if bamboo makes it on to the race track, it'll turn up on the commute soon later. I'll leave you with a look at this wonderful custom creation from Calfee, which would certainly cause a stir at the traffic lights. Its frame is bamboo while the rims are made with Italian birch. Those chunky handlebars? Yep, they're bull horns.

page mise en ligne par SVP

vélo ski de fond plongeon
Consultez notre ENCYCLOPÉDIE sportive