A few weeks back I took the Cotic Roadrat on a gentle ride around a hill with 2,000 of my closest friends - strictly for review purposes, of course.
With a name like a Roadrat you’d expect it to perform pretty well on the road, and it does. Brilliantly well in fact, in the urban jungle. But with wider commuter tyres, the comparative weightiness of disk brakes and mtb bits, a single 42t front ring and MTB cluster in the rear (oo-er) it was shaping up as a bit of a lottery how it would handle 120km of the Taranaki Round The Mountain Cycle Challenge.
The start line was the usual sea of brightly coloured lycra, shaven bits, carbon bling and seriousness. The Cotic, with its wonderfully understated good looks (more Jude Law than Brad Pitt I've been assured) didn’t turn any heads, and nor I suspect did the Makara Peak Supporters shirt (yeah, I succumbed to lycra). No worries there – races aren’t won or lost on start lines, despite the standard of some of the bikes around me at the front of the relay group.
In the 6 or so years since I last rode in a road race, I’d forgotten the speed at which races start. This was no exception – the slow takeoff as everyone waits for the ride in front to move, the symphony of pedals clipping in, and then wham – sudden acceleration as the race is on. The Cotic handled this beautifully – I’m pretty sure it’s the fastest accelerating bike I’ve ever ridden. It's awesome off traffic lights, and off start lines, apparently.
As part of a work team I was due to ride 3 legs with a break after the second – in theory a total of 74km. Not huge, but neither was my training. Leg 1 round the coast to Okato was quick. There are a few rolling hills, but on the flats the bunches were moving. It’s a pretty cool feeling sitting in a big fast bunch, especially when you can be all smug about being on a stealth roadie next to way more appropriate racey bikes.
Leg 2 to Opunake felt even quicker. It was getting damn hot, and the 28c Conti’s were making cool popping sounds on the bubbling asphalt. In a rare act of rebellion the Rat dropped the chain on this leg – a quick fix, but a long grind back to the group. If I had to come up with a criticism of the Roadrat at this point, it’s that the gearing doesn’t stretch out to that of a dedicated road bike. Once you get dropped it’s a bigger challenge to get back on – not insurmountable – just tough.
The flipside of not racing in a long time is that you forget to pace yourself in the early stages. A totally amateur mistake, and one I made brilliantly, so by Opunake I was pretty broken, and well keen on a rest. I swapped the baton thingie to our next rider and headed for the nearest cafe (the Sugar Juice Cafe – all good) to down coffee before racking the bike and heading through to Eltham for my next leg.
The trouble with a 12km leg in a race like this, on a stunning day like this, is that it’s just not long enough. By the time I’d warmed up I was in Stratford, handing over the baton, and itching for more. So after a comfort stop I caught up with our next team rider, and rode with her for a bit, until we caught a bunch of soloists and gave them a bit of a tow. The next transition was at Inglewood, from which it’s only 17 km back to the finish line. At this point it would have been rude not to, so we rode back into New Plymouth, not exactly at a leisurely pace, but slow enough to talk to a few people along the way.
So after just nearly 4 hours, 122km, at 32km/hr, I towed my CEO up the final hill to the finish line and sent him over ahead of me (yes I was sucking up, but job security is important these days), and headed straight for the beer tent. It was a damn good ride – so good that it’s put me off getting a proper road bike for another year – at least until I’ve done the race solo on the Roadrat (if only to compare times to a Giant TCR I last raced the full course on).
Technically, apart from the one chain drop, the Cotic rocked. One of the two rattles it developed part way round was later sourced to a loose bottle cage bolt – the other a recurring rattle from the XTR disk lever. What it lacked for in lightweight go-fastness it made up in rabid acceleration, and despite the only carbon on the whole bike being in the saucy cable-rub patches (a lovely Essence Bicycle addition!) I was feeling remarkably fresh at the end of the race, and even rode home from there without any remorse (may have been helped by aforementioned beer tent though).
When I was a kid, and a bit of a World War II hardware junkie (as most young lads were before Playstation and P) I loved the idea of the Q-Boats – totally innocuous looking trader ships that housed secret armor, guns and torpedoes and attacked by stealth.
The Cotic Roadrat is a bit like that – it might lack the credentials when it’s lining up with Pinarellos and Madones on the start line, but once the gun goes, it does the business good and proper, no fuss, no drama, just a bike, a rider and a whole bunch of speed and fun. It’s all good.
Tune in next month when the Roadrat enters its first mountain bike race!
