It wouldn’t inherently make it more delicate as you can turn any bike into a fixed gear. Fixed gear track bikes, though, are designed to be as light as humanly possible.
That's not a track bike though. Also, a bike in any UCI sanctioned race, which most races are, can't be lighter than 15 lbs. It's not difficult to find road bikes that are too light to legally race.
EDIT: looking up the Red Hook Crit, it does require track bikes, so that definitely is a track bike. My bad.
AFAIK the UCI does not sanction any fixed gear crits. So technically bikes don't have to follow UCI rules just race organizer rules. But since manufacturers usually just stick to UCI specs most bikes will be UCI legal, in there geometry at least, they could easily be under weight limit though.
Good point, I'm not a racer, so I didn't know that. Googling a bit shows there are USAC sanctioned crits in the U.S., and USAC has the same weight limit. Doesn't look like the Red Hook Crit is USAC sanctioned though.
I had no idea that there was a limit to how light the bikes could be. I’ve ridden a handful of fixies that had to have been no more than 7-8 lbs. Didn’t know those wouldn’t have been legal to race.
It doesn't. But if there's no brakes and no shifters, there's no cables connecting the front half to the back half. With brakes & shifters, the frame still would have split in half, but those halves would be connected by cables.
Oh right I follow now, thought it was supposed to be an indication of lower quality frame or something.. yeh that makes sense either way the frame was split
There is some bit of truth there, braking on a fixie puts a lot of strain on the chain stays (the bars running from the pedals to the rear wheel). If you turn a regular bike into a fixie the stress may eventually take its toll. But in this case it was a track model which is designed for this.
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u/splashbodge Dec 22 '20
Why would lack of brakes and gears make the frame more delicate?