Motormouth: Buying a bicycle was almost as fun as buying a car

I was so happy to buy my first rear-drive sports machine, but it only had two wheels and one bhp (boyracer happily pedalling).

Like how I bought all my previous cars, I got the best bicycle I could barely afford. It cost me an arm and a leg – two legs if you count the effort required to make the thing move. 

I enjoyed doing plenty of research before signing on the dotted line, and when I finally placed my booking for the brand-new bicycle, I felt like a rich kid buying his first sports car after passing his driving test. 

Admittedly, my new ride was more BMX than BMW, but I could fool myself into believing that I just purchased an ultimate riding machine, thanks to its sporty specifications. 

Said specs included a light yet stiff aluminium frame, adjustable air suspension, an alloy-composite saddle system, a fast 8-speed gearshifter, ceramic brake pads, and racing tyres reinforced with Kevlar for puncture protection. Porsche-like build quality was the icing on the cycling cake. 

All these and more were neatly packaged together with sophisticated styling, the kind you see from Italian design studios but Taiwan-made in this case. 

Further satisfying this boyracer’s need for speed was an array of aftermarket performance parts, most of them in carbon fibre. 

The exotic technical material could be specified for the handlebars, seat post, wheels, forks and perhaps my impossibly tight cycling shorts too, reducing the vehicle’s weight while increasing the rider’s street cred on park connectors.

Less impressive but more important were safety features like a bright set of lights, a loud bell and a strong helmet, so I got these instead of the carbon fibre frills. Better safe than racy.

In the end, however, I did far more driving than cycling, and my one-bhp (boyracer happily pedalling) bicycle became a zero-bhp bike parked in the storeroom most of the time. 

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