[...] titanium manufacturer Laget is one to watch. They're producing beautiful 3D printed ti framesets with seamless joints and no welds. One road bike I saw came in at 7.4kg and that's titanium!
Laget or TSB is one of the coolest 3d printing companies in bike space IMO. I suspect that most of their work is B2B--and in that sense, they feel like the Silca of China. Their principal is relatively well published in terms of 3d printing metallurgy as well. Not sure how much bike experience they have, but they were at Sea Otter and looks like their staff did the sportive / event there too.
Exact. Except 150g weight difference even up a 2h climb results in a rounding error. Your body weight will fluctuate more than that over such a climb.
You are right; aero is the most important, but it's the aero of the system, not the bike, that matters.
I fall in the camp of folks who think that frame aerodynamics have had more importance attached to them than there should be because people have started to think of them as "free speed." But, if you wind that back and look at CDA numbers and testing protocols you start to see a lot of inconsistency that suggests that aero shaping of a frame has a lot less effect in real world racing than working out the right position or even using a dual layer skinsuit vs. a traditional skinsuit.
A frame like this one probably has a relatively low A in terms of CDA, but more importantly, that extra length, 75-degree seatpost, and low stack allow for the rider to achieve a really low A as well. The round post even opens up the option of using a forward offset post. For the riders that find an improvement from those fit attributes, the change is likely a few multiples more than what an aero frameset with a more traditional geometry would allow when in that fast attack position. A bike that's faster when attacking might be a better fit for riders than one that is optimized for riding efficiently in the flats, depending on the rider's goals. If you were working towards the fastest setup you could get, even within a generous budget, you might be better off getting a frame like this that is easy / cheap to tinker with and spending the money on high-end or even custom skinsuits.
Overall I love the idea of this frame. The geo is unique even compared to the higher-end Chinese and western brands. The only weird thing about this frame is the 43mm offset fork. With this geometry, I would have expected them to use a 47mm.
