World Class Innovation

With a brief to design the world’s fastest aero road bike, Ribble Cycles are proud to launch the all-new Ultra Road, created, manufactured and tested right here in Lancashire, writes Gail Bailey

It has been three years in the making but local company Ribble Cycles are proud to showcase their Ultra Road SL R.

“The design brief was simple – to create the fastest aero road bike in the world. Not just designed to be the fastest when tested in isolation, but the fastest in the real world,” explains Jamie Burrow Head of Product.

Ribble Cycles’ CEO Andy Smallwood is very much product led and he’s all about challenging convention. The company are not afraid to explore new ground in the pursuit of developing a better performing product and this ethos is core to the culture at Ribble. The Ultra SL R is a ground-breaking showcase on the world stage, of a bike designed and built in Lancashire and retailed in the Ribble Valley and beyond.

The Ultra Road has been created to be superfast, following an extensive and revolutionary research and development process of market-leading Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD), wind tunnel testing and real-world analysis. Every aspect of the bike and rider performing in perfect aerodynamic harmony has been considered, to create a machine which has been optimised to give maximum aero advantage.

“We started with a visual concept and tube profile shape ideas and then used CFD to modify each one of those tube sections into the perfect aerodynamic shape for the task,” explains Jamie.

“We always knew we could do it,” he adds. “We believed in the project from the very beginning and there was a real buzz and excitement within the team when we realised how we could innovate the design to create the world’s fastest road bike.”

The key to the project was to design a bike that was quicker and would use less rider energy to get somewhere faster: “What we suddenly realised was that no-one had ever looked at the handlebars. We created a bike and when tested digitally it was fast – but we lost the gains we made when we put a rider on it,” Jamie explains. “Thinking about why this was happening was when we had our ‘eureka’ moment. The handlebars are the first thing in front of the rider that hit the air – changing the shape of these, to create a wake, was the key factor to make the fastest road bike in the world.”

The handlebar shape was industry standard, in order to attach the brake lever and this limited the extremes of the shape. Ribble Cycles are solution focused and they then worked to design a direct mount brake lever, removing the limiting factor and therefore creating the shape needed: “We worked to manipulate the shapes, and the size of the shapes, using trial and error, until we got a solution that had an ergonomic design with aerodynamic technology. It’s been hard keeping this a secret for three years but as a team we did it and it’s a proud moment for us all.”

With many famous riders owning a Ribble, Jamie Burrow himself, former US Postal Team member rode a Ribble from a young age: “I come from a cycling background with both my parents being former British champions and British record holders. I have been going to races for as long as I can remember,” he says. “My dad taught me how to assemble a bike when I was about five or six years old and I’ve always maintained that curiosity about how a bike works, and always searched for the small changes in design that can make a huge difference to performance.”

Being an ex-professional rider means Jamie has not only the design skills but the depth of knowledge of what a cyclist needs from a bike, and this has been integral in the production of the Ultra.

Crossing three centuries and still hand assembling bikes, Ribble Cycles maintains the same company ethos. It remains a local business, out performing on a global stage and continues to fly the flag proudly not only for British design, innovation and engineering but Lancashire too.

ribblecycles.co.uk

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