Tinkering with bikes and components was Hans Christian Smolik's purpose in life. As head of the test and technology department, he played a decisive role in shaping TOUR in the 1980s and early 1990s. Many TOUR readers still remember tuning articles in which Smolik impressively described how he used a file and drill to create a lightweight component from a racing bike crank, for example.
Hans Christian Smolik later wrote numerous specialised books, gave seminars on bicycle technology and worked as an expert witness. Many bicycle inventions can be traced back to Smolik's developments or ideas - or were at least already conceived by him: in his workshop, for example, he assembled the first prototypes for racing bike brake levers in the early 1980s.
Smolik supported bicycle manufacturers such as Canyon and Corratec as a consultant and developer. Together with them, he developed project bikes or (for Canyon) carbon forks as well as his own component series.
In his youth, Smolik was a long-distance runner, after an injury he switched to cycling in 1977. Initially, he only wanted to optimise racing bikes for his own use as an active racing cyclist, but then he began to work on commissions and finally "everything that revolves around the bicycle ... became my world" - as it says on his homepage www.smolik-velotech.de to read.
With his death, the bicycle industry has lost a visionary and creative inventor.
