World’s Lightest Road Bike at 2.7kg

The bike you’re about to see was an idea orig­i­nally started and cre­ated in 2008 by a Ger­man guy named Gunter Mai who logged over 20,000km on the machine for a cou­ple years and it weighed at around 3.2kg.  Early in 2011 he parted out the bike and sold each piece indi­vid­u­ally around the world.  Some of the key parts were bought by some guy in Col­orado who com­mis­sioned Jason Woznick of Fair­wheel Bikes in Tus­con, Ari­zona to cre­ate even lighter parts to fin­ish a new build of it.

Every part on the bike is com­pletely cus­tom made and can­not be bought unless you wanted it made spe­cially for you.  Even if you did want it made for you, you would have to con­tact man­u­fac­tur­ers who already make the light­est parts and then ask them to make a cus­tom piece for you that is even lighter.  Woznick guessed that if you tried to recre­ate the effort put into this bicy­cle, it would cost you at least $45,000.

As a result, this new machine weighs in at 2.7kg or just about 6.0lbs.  I can’t imag­ine what it would be like to hold such a large item that weighs two pounds lighter than a gal­lon of milk, but it must feel like noth­ing!  Even the car­bon fiber used in the wheels isn’t read­ily avail­able (even if you have the cash for it) as it’s a spe­cial grade that was got­ten from some For­mula One guys.

As a result of some of the cus­tom work, this has allowed man­u­fac­tur­ers to push their lim­its.  Both of the pro­to­type Dash hubs will actu­ally be going into mass pro­duc­tion this year, for exam­ple.  Any­way, enjoy the pic­tures as there isn’t quite a bike as exotic as this in all its min­i­mal glory.

Credit for pho­tos and info: Nick Salazar from TriRig.com

To give you an idea of how light this bicy­cle is rel­a­tive to other bikes on the road. The bicy­cle you have prob­a­bly weighs 20lbs pounds or more.  To be under the 20lb mark, you prob­a­bly have spent some “seri­ous” money as each pound you shave off below 20lbs becomes expo­nen­tially more expen­sive, to the point where peo­ple com­pare grams of com­po­nents.  The Union Cycliste Inter­na­tionale (UCI), which is the gov­ern­ing body for most of the pro races around the world, has a min­i­mum weight limit of 6.8kg (about 15lbs). So when you see those $9,000 bicy­cles in the Tour De France, they are about three-times heav­ier than this bicy­cle. Of course there’s more to a bicycle’s per­for­mance than its weight though. A lot of the cost doesn’t go into mak­ing them lighter but in mak­ing them han­dle bet­ter, be stiffer for effi­cient power trans­fer, shift more smoothly, be reli­able, have less rolling resis­tance and most of all to reduce aero­dy­namic drag. As you ride faster, aero­dy­nam­ics are much more impor­tant than weight so unless your entire race is uphill, weight isn’t that impor­tant, but this is pretty amaz­ing stuff any­way, con­sid­er­ing it’s three times lighter than the bikes the pro’s ride with.