Trek Equinox TTX 9.5 (2010)

January 22, 2010

There are two valid reasons, as I am fond of saying, for investing in a custom bike: because you need one; and because you want one. If you're in that second category, but feel guilty about spending a premium on a bike you want but really don't need, there's a middle ground.

Project One has been a big success for Trek in its efforts to sell high-end road bikes like its Madone. You can piece together the frame, frame color and cosmetic scheme, gruppo, crank length, cassette and chainring choices, the spec on wheels, handlebars, and so forth, even down to the colors of your cables. Get your Madone in one of "56 million ways" Trek promises you, and it fulfills that promise.

Now Project One has expanded to triathlon, and we'll overview the Equinox TTX 9.5 against the backdrop of a Project One purchase.

This is an ideal solution for an end user, and a retail store, that rightly understands the proper order of things: a bike fit is executed first, then a bike is chosen from among those that conform to the rider's geometric needs. If a Trek Equinox TTX is on that list, Trek will build you this bike, with the right stem, and the proper length cables and casings. You won't have to sub-out / sub-in cogs or chainrings, saddles, aerobars, what have you, because, like Burger King, Trek thinks you should Have It Your Way. Your bike will arrive in four weeks or thereabouts.

Unlike the Whopper, which is the price it is regardless of whether you want onions, pickles, whatnot, if you want cheese melted over your 9.5 it's going to cost a little more, if you don't want lettuce your 9.5 is going to cost you a little less.

You execute this by going to the Project One website, which takes awhile to load, but, be patient. It's more than a website: It's a feature filled, very powerful application. Your first choice is cosmetics, and there is about a dozen schemes to choose from. Most of these paint schemes come with a wide palette of color options, so, the theoretical number of cosmetic variations must run into the tens of thousands. On the Madone, you can get your name applied to the bike's top tube in one of several typefaces. Alas, not yet with the TTX (just as well, in case you ever have to repair to the Slowtwitch Classifieds forum to sell this on the secondary market, no doubt to upgrade to another, newer, custom Trek).

You can get your 9.5 with one of five gruppos: SRAM Red, Rival or Force; or Shimano Dura Ace or Ultegra. If I want to spec my TTX with, say, Ultegra, the bike lists for $3,570. But wait! There are twelve wheel options! The default is the Bontrager Race Lite Aero Clincher. But I don't want this 'tweener wheel, I'm going to race on a proper race wheel, and this means I'm going to train on a set of functional but, otherwise, beater wheels. I'll choose the bombproof Bontrager Race Clincher and the price for *my* bike just dropped by $225. The Project One website immediately appends the price—and the photo of the bike—to reflect the "custom" bike I've now chosen.

Likewise, I don't want the Race X Lite Aero TT tires, with their "unique wing design." I just want a bombproof training tire, and that's what I choose from among the eight tire options Project One gives me.

And so it goes. I can have either +/-7° stem, or a -17° stem, and if you're an avid reader of Slowtwitch you know which I prefer (there's a link just below this article).

When you go through this process, you must register with Trek. You must as part of the registration process select a dealer. The Project One site gave me three dealers to choose from, based on my zip code. I could choose another dealer instead, and the process to do so was easy.

Trek's point of contact for this is its retailer, of course, and the way that it wants that contact to happen is for me to give Trek my telephone number, it passes this number along to the dealer, and the dealer calls me. Ordinarily, I would be a little put off by this intrusion into my privacy. However, the way I think it should work is that you see the dealer first; you determine the right bike (hopefully via some sort of proper fitting process); then you go home, go online, and select your options (or you sit down at a computer kiosk at the retail store and do it right there). In this case, you're not getting a call from somebody at a retail store you don't know, rather from the person with whom you've already established a relationship.

One thing I really like about this process is that the bike comes exactly as you need it, with the right gearing, the right stem length and pitch, and—though you may not think this important—the right length cables and casings for the stem option you've chosen. Too many production bikes are factory built with cables that are purposely overlong, and too many retailers are too lazy to cut them to the proper length before you march out the door with your new bike.

One thing that confused me about the process on the Project One website: I was not given the option online to choose my proper cassette, whether I wanted standard or Compact-style cranks, my crank length, stem length, and stem angle. This is by design. Trek thinks the dealer should do this for you, or with you, and I'm fine with that. But I looked everywhere, I clicked the "Help" link and looked over all the FAQ-style questions there. Nothing. Just know that all these options are available to you. Trek probably ought to include this in its Project One FAQ or, if it's there and I didn't see it, maybe make this a little more obvious.

Some retailers to whom I spoke bemoan the lack of non-Bontrager wheelset options when "building" your custom Madone. Triathletes aren't going to care about this; Bontrager's training wheels are, along with Neuvation and a few other wheel brands, among the best value going for training wheels, and that's probably the sort of wheel a reader should spec during his TTX purchase. What triathletes will care about is the lack of non-Bontrager saddle and aerobar options. These are important contact points for triathletes—more so than for road racers. Trek as a company is adaptive and self-correcting. I think Trek realizes and will deal with this shortcoming.

There are two sets of Bontrager bars that are offered as TTX options, and your retailer really ought to have both sets in stock, ready for a customer to try, so that you can see if either will work for you. Likewise Bontrager saddles. If they won't work for you, here is your workaround: spec your TTX with the cheapest saddle and aerobar options you can, then when your Project One TTX arrives in the store, have your retailer yank off the saddle and/or bars and replace them with the items of your choice. Just remember this: An aerobar has its own "geometry," and if your chosen aerobar differs from Bontragers in, say, armrest elevation over the handlebar clamp, you'll need to take that into account when selecting your stem angle and, maybe, even your proper TTX frame size.

If I was Trek, I'd have my sponsored triathletes get at least one of their tri bikes via working through the Project One system. Then, I'd have the athletes blog about the process. That would make the athlete much better equipped to understand, and explain to others, the value and the execution of the program. It would put flesh on the bones of this process for a lot of triathletes interested in it.

Okay, now, that's Project One as it applies to the Equinox TTX, and, it can apply to every model of TTX from the 9.5 and up (it doesn't apply to the 9.0). What about the fitness and quality of the bike itself, irrespective of the classy Project One process? Remember, this is the bike ridden by Chris Lieto, Lance Armstrong, Levi Leipheimer, and a lot of other top athletes. So, how bad can it be? On the other hand, Lance rode Trek's Team Time Trial bike too, which was a semi-disaster for triathletes, so, maybe I shouldn't rest my case on that.

In fact, Trek has done a brilliant job with the bike. And, you get a lot of soft value that is not immediately apparent. Yesterday I bought over a thousand dollars worth of ski equipment from a large retailer who boasts this guarantee: I can return this purchase for a full refund at any time. Ever. Now that's service! Trek is that sort of company. No, they don't offer that particular guarantee, but, when it comes to warranty service, the knowledge that the bike is built and engineered expertly, that best processes are used throughout, this is what you get with Trek.

Now, it must be said, the 9.5 is not a bang-for-buck, pound-for-pound, world beater. If you're looking for the cheapest Ultegra tri bike going, or best value in a SRAM Force equipped TT machine, you'll find that the 9.5 sells at a premium. What that premium is depends on where you situate the TTX frame. Is this, for example, the rough value equivalent of a Cervelo P2 frame? P3? P4? Well, the 9.5 pops out of the same mold as the 9.8 and 9.9, but, uses Trek's "black" carbon, a lower modulus lay up than its "red" carbon used in these higher-end models, but higher modulus than its "white" carbon. So, I don't know, P3 level? Is that fair? Likewise, about the Felt B2 level, and Cannondale's Slice HI-MOD 2? If these are rough equivalents, then the 9.5 is probably fairly priced relative to some of triathlon's most robust sellers.

But how does the bike fit and ride? As you might know, we like to pigeonhole tri bikes into two geometric categories: long-and-low; and narrow-and-tall. Cervelos, Felts, QR's CD0.1 and Tequilo, Kestrel's Airfoil Pro, Kuota's Kueen K, Ridley and others make bikes that are moderately or very long-and-low. If you ride steep, and you're of average morphology, these bikes will fit you well. Cannondale's Slice, Scott's Plasma, and others tend to be toward the narrow/tall end. Those who ride slightly less steep, and are perhaps longer of leg (as opposed to longer of torso), will find these bikes geometrically appealing. Where is the Equinox TTX along this gradient? In general, these bikes fall into the narrow/tall column, but, the degree to which this is the case depends on the size.

There are five sizes of TTX, a new 50cm size, 54cm, 56cm, 58cm and 60cm. The 50cm size is a godsend, Trek has sorely needed this for years. This 50cm is moderately narrow/tall, about like a Cannondale Slice or a Scott Plasma. The one thing I don't like about this bike: it's got a LOT of trail (67mm). This is going to make the bike extremely stable at race speeds, but, rather doglike in its handling. It'll be irrepressibly straight-line-ish, especially when you're out of the saddle. You'll get used to it, but, it'll take a bit of getting used to.

Trek has made what I think is a slight tactical error in its geometries: they've built their bikes with 73° of head angle and 40mm of fork offset. This is fine in terms of a frame's trail, which is 61mm (except for that new smallest size). I'd prefer if the bikes were built more along the lines of 72° of head angle and 45mm or 46mm of offset, which would give these bikes a bit longer front/center, and make them more steep-angle friendly as regards weight displacement.

But I'm being picky. The bikes handle nicely. That said, Trek throws the 50cm size's front wheel out there by shallowing the head angle to 72°. It's doing this because it won't make its small size with 650c wheels, and this is probably because its dealer base—which often includes full-service, or road-oriented, retailers—is less likely than tri-specialist retailers to grasp and accept the 650c idea. This means the head angle of this size TTX has to be shallowed by a degree to get that big 700c front wheel out in front of the rider's shoe, to keep from overmuch show overlap. Fine. But then add an extra 5mm or 6mm of offset to the fork to bring that trail back to a reasonable number. As a bonus, you'll get even more front/center, and have even less shoe overlap.

Likewise, its 54cm and 56cm sizes are geometrically Slice/Plasma-like, that is, moderately narrow/tall. But, because Trek specs its bikes with headset top caps that are only 5mm tall, the bikes tend to size up not quite as tall as they otherwise might (I think that's a wise spec option Trek has made).

Then there's the 58cm size, which gets 4cm taller in "stack" though it only increases about a centimeter in "reach." This is a tough go. As narrow/tall goes, this bike is narrower and taller than it is in the smaller sizes. This is Trek's most problematic size.

Trek has another new size, its 60cm, and it's just a monstrously big bike. I think it's probably the biggest tri bike made. If you're 6'5" or taller, think about this size. It's both longer and taller than Cervelo's P2 in its 61cm size; its slightly longer and considerably taller than Felt in 60cm; it's slightly taller and way longer than the Slice in its 60cm size. If you're a just a big, big guy, this is your bike.

Have you heard enough yet? No? This review hasn't been long enough? Fine, I'll keep going.

Here's your take-away. This bike, custom in every way save geometry, is probably going to cost you somewhere between $3300 and $5500, depending on whether you want the power windows, sunroof, and heated seats. There's a hidden value here for you and your retailer: he doesn't have to sub out or sub in new stem, cranks, cassette, and so forth, charging you for the upgrade, and undergoing the hassle of essentially rebuilding what was an already built bike. Also, he didn't have to pay for, sit on, and floor, this bike, risking whether he'd be able to sell it. This means he's got a little more margin to play with. And this means you might have a little negotiating power.

I think your best play is to decide, in advance, at your retailer's shop, whether the Bontrager saddle and aerobars will work for you. If not, then, decide what saddle and aerobars you do want, and try to strike your best substitution deal with your retailer. If the Bontrager items are fine for you, then haggle for a set of pedals.