Scott Plasma 30 (2010)
The Plasma was developed with the input of two legendary athletes, the late Steve Larsen and Kiwi Ironman legend Cameron Brown. Since then, the latter has exhibited quick bike-to-bike transitions, bolting Scott for Pinarello, and that company for Avanti. The Plasma's current headliner is Normann Stadler, as well as his Commerzbank teammates.
The Plasma's progeny has since been used by the Columbia High Road team for its TTs, though last year the team road Shiv-like, Trinity Advanced-like, prototypes, and now they're riding the classy Plasma 3.
The Plasma 30 is built on the Plasma 1 frame platform. It's the oldest in the Plasma series, but is still a lot of frame for $2780 (complete bike price). The frame is very light—the world's lightest when it was first introduced—and a lot of its light weight is due to a feature common to the Ridley Dean, the Kuota Kueen K, and a few other models: There is no seat post, per se; the seat mast just keeps on going up. Without this feature, a frame has to be a lot beefier in the seat cluster area, and that adds weight.
Of course, the elegance of the telescoping seat post is its adjustability, its compactness, ease of shipping and packing, and, you don't have to worry about cutting the seat mast too short. Those are the trade-offs.
The attached graph (below) riffs off the graph I attached to my write-up of the Trek Equinox TTX 9.0. Scott's Plasma is the king of narrow/tall bikes. If this is the geometry you need, Scott makes a very suitable bike. Who needs a bike like this? A rider who isn't riding steep. If you don't ride steep, then, you probably also don't ride too low in front (if you rode with a shallow seat angle while low in front, you'd be pinched in your hip when you're at top dead center of the pedal stroke).
This bike's seat angle is at 76°, and, this angle plus or minus 1° is where this bike is designed to be ridden. The Scott is therefore an important brand for retailers who set their riders up this way. Newsflash: If you ride a Cervelo P3 with your seat post hardware in the rearward hole; and if you have 4cm or 5cm of spacers under your stem; and if your LBS had to root around his shop looking for the shortest stem he could point skyward, atop which your aerobars are mounted; then you're on the wrong bike, my friend. Scott made your bike. You either need a new bike position or a new bike (this one).
There is another sort of person who successfully rides narrow/tall bikes: The fellow, or gal, with long legs and a short torso. Even if this rider chooses a steep seat angle, the long legs perch this rider up in the air, requiring a taller head tube; and his or her short torso requires a bike that's short in the cockpit. Ergo, a narrow/tall geometry.
However, if this leggy person wants to ride steep, there is a practical limit to the saddle fore/aft adjustability to the Plasma 1 frame. Its seat post hardware is really not made for a forward slide of the saddle. The Plasma 2 frame—geometrically almost identical to the Plasma 1, but with a different shape seat mast—features a Ritchey seat cap that does allow forward adjustability in excess of what you get with the Plasma.
And here's a semi-tragedy: This bike reviewed here today would instantly work for more people than it currently does if it just had a redesigned seat cap that allowed for forward adjustability. This is no secret to Scott. I can only imagine it's a question of design and engineering priorities. And certainly a priority is the very sexy Plasma 3, which might be my favorite of all the new superbikes (Specialized Shiv, Trek Speed Concept, Giant Trinity Advanced, et al), although I'll withhold my judgment pending a test ride and a final look at the geometry charts.
But even after the Plasma 3 is introduced, Scott has still got a lot of life in the Plasma 1 frame, should it decide to continue its production for the next few years. But, Scott needs to decide whether to just ditch the Plasma 1 and move the Plasma 2 down to the Plasma 1 price points; or redesign the seat post head of the Plasma 1. One or t'other.
Otherwise, the frame—though not an industrial design triumph, like the Plasma 2 and 3—is very nice, very well made. The fork is not that seamless match for the frame, like the Plasma 2, or the Specialized Transition. But the lines are nice, the cable routing is clean, Scott has done a very nice job here. There are a bevy of frames—the Slice, the Transition, the Equinox TTX, the Plasma 3—that probably never would've gotten made and sold at a price this low were it not for the need for top quality timed race bikes for Pro Tour cycling teams, and I rather think that the Plasma 1 frame is also in that category.
The spec is typical for a company striving and stressing to get a frame this good to sell for a high-entry-level price. Still, there are some oddities to the spec. The drivetrain is a 105/Ultregra mix, but the crank and BB are Truvativ. This component company was purchased several years back by SRAM, and SRAM's own crank technology comes, in some part, from the Truvativ engineers. One would usually spec a Truvativ crank along with SRAM (or a SRAM crank with SRAM). But, nothing wrong with spec'ing Truvativ with Shimano. I did when I was a bike maker (of course, that was more than a decade ago, before Truvativ was a SRAM company).
The wheels are the Plain Jane—but very reliable—Shimano WH-R500A, the saddle is a typical OE house brand placeholder that will probably need to be upgraded at the point of purchase.
My only problem with this bike's spec is the same problem I have with every company that specs Profile T2+ aerobars: Aerobar technology has moved on. This bar's time has passed or, more precisely, this bar's extension's time has passed. An aluminum S-bend extension is just not good enough for a bike that's going to cost north of $3000 out the door, once sales tax is added. I wouldn't mind this—I'd just say, "Heck, like the saddle, it's OE spec, let's pull it off and stick some decent extensions in there"—but it's not so easy to yank out a set of extensions and reroute the cables (certainly do-able, just, it's a pain the rear).
Furthermore—and see my write-up of the Trek Equinox TTX 9.0—if you're going to stick an aerobar with a high-profile armrest on top of a frame with narrow/tall geometry, please explain why few of your pros ride that sort of set-up? It's hard to find many (if anyone) riding on the RadioShack team, or the Trek/K-Swiss tri team, who'll ride with aerobars as tall as the Bontragers spec'd on the TTX 9.0. It's likewise hard to find a Plasma rider on the High Road or Commerzbank teams who's riding high profile armrests such as those spec'd here on the Plasma 30.
Mind, I think there are a fair number of triathletes who'll need all the height this bike gives them, as spec'd. If that's you, then, the bike as spec'd might be your geometric match. Still, let's put these aluminum S-bends out of their misery. When they first came along, a few years ago, I thought they were cool. But there are better, more ergonomic, bends out there.
What I'd like to know, but don't as of this writing (perhaps I'll attach a late-add to this article) is Scott's fork offsets. This is important to me, because I'm picky about handling, and Scott doesn't list its offsets on its geometry charts (probably a shrewd move, to keep minor prophets like me from writing jeremiads against models with too much trail).
There is a "Plasma Contessa," but, as with Trek's WSD, these bikes are identical to the men's bikes except for the paint job, and for the understandable lack of a women's SKU in the largest mold size.
The Plasma 30, then, is a candidate for the same narrative as the Equinox TTX. These molds still have life in them, they're great bikes, but, each needs a little sprucing up going forward. In the case of the Trek, it's probably just going to be abandoned in favor of the Speed Concept. Will the Plasma 1 frameset likewise drift away, to be replaced in these lower price points by the Plasma 2 frame? I don't know. But it need not be. A change of aerobar spec; a redesigned seat clamp; and Scott instantly moves from an important tri bike line to an urgent tri bike line.
And I can count all of triathlon's urgent bike lines on one hand, and still have fingers left over.
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