Bike Check
Lucas Strain
Photography by Kai Caddy
Lucas Strain
HOMETOWN: Bentonville
OCCUPATION: Painter and designer
THE BIKE: A 2019, new to me, Cannondale SystemSix. It’s pretty fast. I’m always in between team bike, and I normally just ride whatever I’m given. I was swapping teams and the end of the year and I wasn’t going to have a bike for a couple of months. Normally, all I pretty much look for in a race bike is whatever is the stiffest and the most aero. And since this bike came out in 2018, I’ve wanted one. According to their white sheet it’s still as aero as the Cervelo S5. It’s used, I got [the frame and fork] for $1,200. That’s good enough for me. I’m not trying to spend $10,000 on a bike.
PAINT: Yeah, I did some crazy custom paint — a little marbilizer with a purple fade and some sparkles in the black that give it that Giger alien universe kind of feel to it.
GROUPSET: I’ve got kind of my ideal race build, which is Ultegra DI2. It works as well as Dura Ace, but it’s easier to replace something out of town if it’s crashed.
CRANKSET/POWER METER: A Rotor 30-millimeter crankset with my 55-tooth sprint chainring setup and a Power2Max power meter which is a really sweet German power meter that’s pretty accurate.
WHEELESET: Easton SL90, 38-millimeter wheels that are awesome for training and for cross-windy races.
HANDLEBARS: 34-centimeter Specialized women’s anatomically correct handlebars that are super narrow and aero. They were $37 on the Specialized website. I drilled them multiple times to wire the DI2 through them. It took a long time to find them. I was on Reddit forums a lot.
STEM: A negative 20, Zipp SL90 stem with a slam that stem top cap just to make it as low as possible. Normally I have 100 millimeter head tubes on my bikes and this Cannondale only comes with 110-millimeter. So this was just to achieve the fit I normally ride.
BOTTLES: My buddy, Jason [Gallacher], who runs Affinity Cycles just happened to have some bottles that perfectly matched it and sent them over.
