The new Spoon Customs Vars Disc custom carbon road bike, equipped with Enve 5.6SES and Campagnolo Super Record EPS 12

The Col De Vars lends its name to our newest custom carbon road bike, Vars Disc. It is a lightweight, custom-made carbon race frame designed around you and the riding you do. Familiar aero features (CFD tested and verified in a scale tunnel) combine with a completely unconstrained approach to construction which means every dimension is controllable.

We make it from the highest quality TorayCA 1000 fibre, in our moulds, using a layup we adjust for our customer’s own inputs. The construction of the bike combines the benefits of monocoque fabrication methods in the headtube-downtube components with the flexibility afforded by tube-to-tube work.

As a project it’s taken two years to get right, but in a sense we’ve been trying to find a solution to the same problem we were working on with the first steel bikes, just in reverse.

On the one hand with the steel project, we were trying to prove that a material we believe in was and is still relevant. We achieved that - we created a stiff, light, purposeful race bike, that responds when you need it to.

On the other hand, the work was about trying to push the very limits of what steel can do in terms of lightweight feel, and responsiveness, to work at the very outer ranges of what steel technology can do in a fast road race bike. Combined with progressive geometry, we produce a stiff, light, contemporary ride that doesn’t feel like you’re giving anything away to the arguably more fashionable carbon race frames.

Where those steel tubes excel (thank you, Columbus), is in harnessing the natural elastic properties of the material at the limit, where the tubes help keep your wheels glued to the road, whether climbing aggressively, or descending fast hairpins where you need precision, but you also need some real communication with the road.

Carbon for its benefits (and there are many including higher strength to weight) is less good at that, because it doesn’t have the same natural elasticity. Therefore, it isn’t as able to communicate with you in the way well made steel can, and it’s often overly stiff. Specialised bikes in fact recently gave up on the out and out aero shapes of the Venge in favour of aero-enough shapes where they could design in some ride quality. And that’s become a bit of a general - welcome - direction across the board.

Carbon can, if in a frame that’s ‘too stiff’, allow your contact patches to lose touch with the road, often in the moments where you really want them not to. It’s that ‘stiffness’ problem inherent in the material that we had to ‘reverse solve’ in the context of the Vars project.

That’s not to say ‘stiffness’ isn’t important, it is extremely important. It was one of the main questions in the steel bike design projects - the one we worried about most. But it needs to be balanced with compliance where it’s needed and it’s in the careful marriage of the two where a good bike is made.

Bikes like TCR, and Tarmac, complete with their now familiar aero-enough features, find a better balance. They’re great bikes.

Bikes like the Aethos take it further, using even less of the black stuff, in round tube formats, and that’s why that bike feels so relevant to so many journalists, it’s just got a better mix of stiffness and compliance.

The trouble is that in the hands of the public the position afforded by the Aethos is so similar to the Tarmac that it won’t suit most riders. It’s revolutionary to plenty of journalists and they’re not wrong, but they live on their bikes, much like the pros do. With Vars, where more individual fit is possible for a more infinite range of riders, we had to find a nice balance that would mean Vars feels just as balanced as any of that new crop of road bikes, without any of the downsides associated with restrictive handling or fit geometry.

Spoon Customs Vars Disc uses a proprietary head tube down tube design which is moulded in monocoque, to increase front triangle responsiveness and precision in the steering

Thanks to some solid work by David at my sister brand WM (WyndyMilla) over the last ten years, we had a really good starting point in the WM Massive Attack. David had commissioned scale tunnel research to verify the CFD findings on the downtube shapes they had created, and the decision to mould the head tube with the downtube (as in monocoque construction) gave that bike loads of front end stability where the round tube built bikes, made with a narrower fork steerer and round, lower profile tubing, would have created a less direct front end and front triangle than our new bike needed.

For our Vars, we revisited these shapes, sticking with the moulds but reviewing the fibre book, to add in more TorayCA 1000 fibre, improving response and strength to weight.

Our approach to geometry is straight out of the Spoon playbook, verified here in the carbon context (amongst other ways) by a bike built for and ridden by endurance rider, Chris Hall (now with Cervelo). He’d come to WM just after the Massive Attack 2 was launched way before I was involved with some expectations around the numbers, and for one reason or another, they’d gone with Chris’s numbers for his bike. I got hold of that bike, and while it isn’t exactly the same as our geo chart for this bike, it gave David and I some confidence we were on the right track.

The new bike shown here is made around my coordinates for a stock 56, and it’s a fast road set up. It’s pretty aggressive as the parlance goes.

For your bike, we work with you in a three hour fit process to get under the skin of your riding and work on a position and approach to handling geometry that will do what you want it to do, whether you want a bike to put you on the podium at the local crit’ series, or just to get you up and down a mountain safely on an alpine Sportive, we’ll dial it in to do just that.

Our approach to building your Vars Disc puts you at the centre of the design process and when we get that right for you, in a perfectly fabricated and finished bike that fits just right (with the right balance of stiffness and compliance) we think something special happens.

In carbon, here at Spoon Customs, the name for that special something is Vars Disc.

Thanks have to go to Nate and Gabriel at DAM London who prototyped our front end parts to allow the integration you can see in the final bike.

The head cups in Vars Disc were produced using DAM London's completely new filament material, made from recovered Ocean Plastic and recycled Carbon Fibre.

Work on using recovered materials in our bikes is part of a wider effort we’re undertaking that I hope will soon see your old bike traded in against your new one, to create feedstock for parts that we’ll make for your new bike. For now, it’s just the head cups, but we think there’s loads of applications for this new filament material and it shows that a new approach to dealing with carbon at the end of the product’s lifecycle is possible.

Designing Vars Disc our first carbon road bike

© Spoon Group Ltd 2023.

info@spooncustoms.com

+44(0)1252 782960