Dirk Spiers, Marketing Manager of Giant Europe, looks a little shaken when he arrives at the TOUR editorial office at midday on 18 May 2004. However, he has also travelled halfway around the world for 48 hours to keep Giant's promise. The promise to finally provide TOUR with a current TCR Composite carbon frame for a test after a long period of insistence. Strictly speaking, this is not the "TCR Composite" model that has been known for around three years, but a prototype of the more advanced "TCR Advanced". Until recently, Giant had always kindly but skilfully avoided testing the TCR Composite, even though the bike has long been in bike shops, bought and ridden. Most recently, the TOUR testers were put off until the successor model on the occasion of the big carbon frame test in January 2004. Did Giant fear that the "old" TCR would perform (too) badly? The fact is: Not only many readers, but also the TOUR testers finally wanted to know what the bike was all about - especially since Team T-Mobile is equipped by Giant. And that's why we bought a TCR composite frame incognito from a specialist dealer in the meantime - as it will remain in the programme.
TOUR advantage: the chance to test twice. After all, we normally refuse to test prototypes for good reasons: it is easy for manufacturers to undermine poor test results by pointing to changes in series production. Also, nobody knows whether a prototype will ever go into series production and be sold. And even if it does, it is not certain whether the production bike will still have anything to do with the test specimen - at least not until a new test has taken place. With the two TCR frames in comparison, however, there was an opportunity to scrutinise the standard production bike and to find out whether the prototype could at least hope for improvements to the future production bike.
Read more in the free PDF download.
Downloads:
download
