To my ears, metal bikes go tink-ping, endurance bikes smooosh and aero bikes whoompf. But my favourite sound of all is the scud. bikes encounter uneven ground through fast corners, and I think it’s a mixture of tyres fighting for grip as bike and rider slice the air with concurrent fizz. If you’ve never heard a scud, I can only liken it to sitting inside a car while its windows are sprayed with a pressure hose.
It’s also not a sound I come across too often when riding. It takes a certain tackiness of tyre tread and a certain quality of road surface. But above all else it takes a certain type of bike. One with just the right amount of flex to track the road, yet stiff enough still to dance across miniature peaks of uneven macadam. It takes a bike with absolute poise and balance. It takes an Argonaut.
Ultimate experience
If you want you can save yourself the time of reading the rest of this review by stopping at the end of this paragraph: the Argonaut Road Bike is very, very good. I can’t say it’s the best bike in the world (I haven’t tested all the bikes in the world), but it’s certainly in my top one.
