BQ 69 (Autumn 2019)

To celebrate this year’s Paris-Brest-Paris, we’ve put together our biggest edition yet. On 128 pages, we take you right into the action of the famous 1200 kilometer randonnée in France. We also feature three bikes of PBP riders, including Jan’s new Rene Herse.

Half a world away from Paris, we take you into the workshop of Cherubim, the iconic Japanese builders. We show you how they file lugs, pantograph parts with their logos and braze their frames. We talk with Cherubim’s Shinichi Konno about frame stiffness and how it’s optimized for Japan’s professional Keirin racers.

OPEN’s new WI.DE. has been winning awards right and left. We don’t only test the new bike, but also compare it to their superlight U.P.P.E.R. Does the new bike with its ability to run 60 mm-wide tires make the other obsolete? Or do you give up something when you go this wide?

Ted King is known as the ‘King of Gravel,’ having won Dirty Kanza, Grinduro and many other gravel races. Before he turned to gravel, he raced as a professional in Europe. We asked him what it was like to lead the Tour de Franceon the road and help Peter Sagan win the Tour‘s green jersey. Ted talks about what it’s really like to race in the world’s biggest races, about the differences between racing for a North American and an Italian team, and how he decided to race gravel upon ‘retiring.’

As a counterpoint to all this talk about steel bikes and wide tires, we feature Christopher Shand’s trip across Europe and the Balkans on carbon racing bikes and 25 mm tires. As you can imagine, theirs was a real adventure.

Those are just five of the fascinating stories in the Autumn Bicycle Quarterly.