It's not that hard to convince yourself that in order to speak about what you sell knowledgeably you need to try things out once in a while or in other words, you need to pedal what you peddle. To that end I was easily convinced by myself that I should try one of these
Soma Speedsters for a bit.
The Speedster is Soma's all rounder road bike designed with the old school Randonneur in mind, or just for someone with an appreciation of a well made bike that looks pretty good too. Soma uses Tange Prestige double butted chromoly on pretty much every bike they make and they make quite a few bikes without being silly about it. So yeah, the Speedster. What do you need to know? It's steel, and I like that, and it's got some pretty nice paint, and I like that too, but most novel is the use of chromed lugs, and I really like that.
As a person who owns too many bikes already I questioned the need for yet another one but there's very little I can't rationalize when I put my head to it. To that end I realized that I didn't have a sturdy but quick urban commuter capable of holding a pair of full fenders and geared just right for both racing down Broadway when I'm late getting to the shop to open it
and hauling a kid trailer up a steep hill to daycare in the morning. Sure, I have a cyclocross bike with fender eyelets on it but I couldn't bring myself to putting full fenders on my cross bike because that's just not "right." And my 29er, well, it's just too heavy for riding every day. So there I was in the shop moving a collection of bike parts I had onto a pretty cherry red Soma Speedster.
That was about a month ago and I figured with 30 days of riding on the bike it was fair to write a little something about it. The quick review is this: I like it, it's a very good bike.
But of course there's more. What I like about the Speedster is that it is first and foremost a road bike. The BB isn't too high like a lot of cross bikes, the handling is reasonably quick, and while steel is rarely light (especially lugged) this bike doesn't feel heavy. I mean, it
is heavy, but it doesn't ride like it. You'll notice they've designed the bike around long reach brakes so that there's room for a full fender set and slightly larger tires. I'm running 700X28s on it and there's probably a bit of room for something a tiny bit bigger. There's also mounting points for a rack. The longer wheelbase isn't excessive, it's 101cm on my 56cm frame, which is only a centimeter and a half longer than what you might find on a more aggressive road frame the same size and can probably be wholly attributed to what they needed to do to leave room for a fender and bigger tire between the rear wheel and the seat tube. This slightly longer wheelbase makes for a stable bike without being too slow in the handling and I have a great deal of confidence in it when I'm aiming for the gap between the segmented bus and the construction pylons along Broadway at Cambie on my way to work.
Criticisms? Yeah, there is at least one. Why are the head tubes so short? You'll see from the pictures I've got a couple of bigger spacers under the stem and the stem has been inverted to get the front end up where I like it. Across the size range of the Speedster the head tubes are quite short which seems contrary to the stylings and most likely use of a frame such as this. I think it would be nice to see the sizing of this bike increase by about 2cms for the head tubes and seat tubes for any given size. Another bike I sell, the
Salsa Casserole, seems to be more in tune with this fit ideology and though it's a bit more affordable than the Speedster it's lacking the chromed lugs and like I said before, I really like the chromed lugs. And that being said, I really do like this bike despite the low-ish front end. Now I just have to figure out how I can rationalize owning a Casserole too. I mean, I really should ride both of them to speak knowingly about the differences between the two similar bikes, right? Right?
