Peddle power

The Type 136 will cost £20,000 for the first 136 examples – finished in the black-and-gold which Lotus is careful not to refer to as the John Player Special livery, fags not being entirely compatible with cycling – before dropping to £15,000 for the standard version. If that sounds insanely expensive for a bicycle, 12 Type 108s were sold to the public in 1992 at the same price, or around £32,000 adjusted for inflation, and Type 136 buyers will be getting a lot more for their money.

There are similarities: the new bike was also overseen by Richard Hill and echoes the 108’s carbon monocoque design and Darth Vader looks. It’s like nothing else on two wheels. The frame, made by F1 supplier Compositex in Italy to Lotus’s design, is an elegant, purposeful tangle of wings and foils. The fork blades and seat stays (which run diagonally from the seat post down to the rear hub) are particularly distinctive. Bicycle design was once obsessed with narrow clearances but now they are set wide apart so they align with the airflow around the rider’s legs, and leave the rear end stiffer so more of your effort is translated into motion rather than flex.

But while the track-only 108 had neither brakes nor gears, the road-going 136 has both, and adds an electric assistance system created by the ex-Jordan and Jaguar F1 engineer Gary Anderson using a tiny, powerful, zero-maintenance e-motor developed for NASA’s Mars Lander, hidden in the downtube and making up to 200 watts despite weighing just 300g. The whole thing weighs 9.8kg with battery, a penalty of around 2.5kgs over a typical, unassisted high-end road bike, but one worth paying.

The motor won’t power the 136 unaided, but the rider will be able to choose when to engage it and how much help it provides. A rider of reasonable fitness might cruise at around 200w, so with the motor doubling that you’ll have a power output closer to that of a pro. It will run for around three hours, enough for a six-hour ride or more, given that you won’t use it when descending, cruising or with a tailwind. And if you run out of juice, the battery is disguised as a water bottle, and easily swapped.

But does one of the most successful cyclists ever to turn a pedal – and one who could make (briefly) a peak of more than 2500 watts with his legs alone – condone the use of artfully hidden electrical assistance?

‘It’s not about competing. You’re still using your legs and your lungs. You’re still working as hard, and you’ll come home just as tired, but you’ll have got more out of your ride. Would you rather climb one mountain pass in a day unaided, or two with this bike? It’s about getting more out of the experience.’

The Aston Martin .1R looks, at first glance, a little more normal than the Lotus: its frame is made of conventional tubes rather than the air-sculpted monocoque of the Type 136, and the propulsion is all done by you. But despite its apparent simplicity, it is far more expensive than the Lotus: at least twice the price of a standard 136, and so expensive that despite repeated attempts, Aston won’t give me an exact price.

But I think it’s worth it: both for the 1000 hours that its maker, the Rutland-based J.Laverack will put into each one, and for the fact that in its subtle way it is even more radical than the Lotus.

Car designers talk about A- and B-surfaces. The A-surface is the designers’ domain; the mostly smooth and glossy bits that make up the exterior when everything is closed. B-surfaces are for the engineers, and what you see when you open the bonnet or boot or door. The problem with bike design is that it’s pretty much all B-surface: there might be a lovely paint job but the frame carries the transmission and brakes and some or all of their cabling on the outside. The bolts holding it all together are mostly exposed and the maker of each component too often feels entitled to plaster it with its logo. Despite its conceptual simplicity, a bicycle is often a visual mess.

Not something Marek Reichman is likely to tolerate. Aston’s long-serving Chief Creative Officer is also a repeat J.Laverack customer, and when he started this project with the company two years ago, his aim was to build a bike that was ‘visually boltless’.

‘The thinking came out of One-77 where every surface is an A-surface. When you open something, it has to look like it’s on the outside. And that was the philosophy here. I wanted pure. I didn’t want to see cabling. I didn’t want to see the bits that detract from the art of the frame. Laverack took the challenge on, and it’s a big challenge: how do we hide everything, route everything.

‘We would never make a bicycle,’ he adds. ‘I’ve got no idea about making a bicycle. For our partnerships I need an expert. But because I’m a relative novice, I can challenge the norm. I can ask why they do it like that. And if they can’t tell you why, they can probably change it.’

It takes a lot of work to make something so simple and seamless. The brakes are probably the craziest part of the .1R. Pretty much every other bike maker buys its brakes in from one of the big component suppliers, as the car makers do, and bolts the calliper to the frame. Not on the .1R. Instead, J.Laverack has designed its own hydraulic braking system from scratch to allow it to be built into the frame and forks, and for its hoses to be completely hidden. For a bike that will be built in such tiny numbers, that’s borderline insane. Oliver Laverack, founder of J.Laverack, acute petrolhead and a former employee of Car magazine, says that the tiny gold pistons – four per calliper, rather than the usual two – are his favourite feature, but sadly hidden. He looks exhausted.

There are too many other bonkers details to list here, such as how the crank tips, stem and handlebars are 3D-printed to fit the customer to the millimetre, or how the hybrid carbon and titanium elements in the frame and bars are mated by F1 suppliers to a precision beyond that required in F1.

‘There is more care and attention put into the joint between the titanium top tube and the carbon lugs at the end than we put into some of our cars,’ says Marek. ‘We’ve learned more about 3D-printing through this process than we would have internally. The technology on Valour and Valhalla and Valkyrie is often non-standard automotive because you’re trying to do something special very efficiently and very quickly. To diversify is to learn, and if a project like this gives us a one per cent advantage, it’s worth it.’

So instead of being a cynical cash-in, do these bicycles actually aid the development of the next Lotus or Aston? It would be nice to think so. But viewed in isolation and regardless of price they are beautiful, intelligent, efficient works of design and engineering, and I want both very badly.

‘This is a unique bike,’ says Hoy says of the Lotus, ‘a piece of history unlike anything collectors will already have. I hope it won’t just be a museum piece that people will hang on a wall and sit with a glass of wine and look at. I hope they take it out and use it and enjoy it.’