Pinarello?

There is little doubt. The Pinarello Prince is a fine bicycle. Allesandro Valverde did pretty well on it. A lot of people seem to like it. It has won a lot of awards.

Here is what Pinarello says about it:

Here is the finest racing bicycle in the world
That statement may sound presumptuous, but it’s based on the number of awards received in only two years’ time: Best Racing Bicycle in the World (Bicycling USA) for two consecutive years, 2008 and 2009, Bike of the Year (Ciclismo ITA) for two consecutive years, 2008 and 2009 – awards that no other bicycle had received before.

The features of Prince are best summarized in the enthusiastic comments received from a happy Prince owner: Unbelievable!
Prince gives you completely new emotions that literally infl ame demanding cyclists: incredibly easy to handle when entering high speed curves, absolutely explosive on violent accelerations on straight stretches or coming out of a curve, and when you stand on the pedals the bicycle feels like a motorbike, gripping the road with all the power of your legs.

It inflames and floats 3 inches off the ground! There you go.

I am going to go out on a limb and say that the Prince does not do a lot for me. I do not hate the Prince but it is not my taste. I now have a new reason to justify my dislike.  Last saturday, a customer brought in an FP3 for some work. The bike had been ridden pretty but was fine. Except for the headset. It felt like an old threaded headset that had been indexed. The headset felt like crap.

I removed the wheel and the front brake. I took off the top cap and upper assembly of the integrated headset. I then banged out the fork. I was to surprised to find the following:

1. No crown race; and
2. the bearing was a normal cartridge style sealed axial bearing not an angular contact bearing.

As we can see on this Prince, the inner ring of the bearing sets onto the fork and a ridge rests against the inner ring of the bearing.  The outer  ring rests against the frame. The top of the inner ring of the bearing is unsupported. Why not use an angular contact bearing like everyone else?

Back to the FP#, I pulled out the bearing and replaced it. The races had separated as as a result the fork had rested against the frame itself, making for incredibly crappy steering and a nice ring in the paint on the fork.

I am by no means an engineer. I have not run any double blind stress tests on multiple piners to see if the FP3 was an exception. With anything, we give the benefit of the doubt to the engineers and designers at Pinarello. But, the headset design just seems, intuitively at least, wrong. I have enough problems of an inflammatory nature without getting more from riding a Prince.