Jan writes:
"Contrasting your experience, I find that my old bikes are faster than the new stuff I test for Vintage Bicycle Quarterly... Whether a placebo effect (I love the old machines, so I go faster?) or not, my best times all have been on "old" machines - whether short (2 mile) hillclimbs or 765 miles on a 1947 tandem in Paris-Brest-Paris 2003, where only one tandem was faster. And that tandem was 30+ years old, too, and ridden by two men, whereas ours was mixed."
Since when was the 2003 PBP a race? It is my understanding that the PBP is not considered a race and the organizers even discourage people from treating it as a race. As for the validity of your time results using "old" over "new" I suppose it goes to reinforce the overall validity of the rest of the content of the mag.
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Steven Maasland
Moorestown, NJ