Why is a Steelman Eurocross better than a BMW 7 Series?
Well, for openers, it’s a Steelman Eurocross. And you can’t just slide on down to your local Steelman dealer and drive one off the lot, because Brent Steelman isn’t making them any longer.
Even if you could, its touchscreen wouldn’t be showing you an ad for “Spider-Man: Brand New Day” the instant you climbed aboard, which BMWs are doing. My Steelman Eurocrosses ain’t got no steekeeng touchscreens. Oh, sure, they share an ancient Cateye Velo 8, but it doesn’t say shit to me because it saw what I did to Herself’s sportswatch with a claw hammer when the fucker started beeping and wouldn’t shut the hell up.
I knew this day was coming the first time I pulled into a gas station for a tank of the cheap stuff and the pump started shrieking advertising bullshit at me. I nearly drove off right then and there, but I was running on fumes, and figured that if one station was doing it, they all were.
And they all are.
The Eurocross “touchscreen.” One button, no Spider-Men.
So, guess what? If six-figure BMW 7 Series sedans are inflicting advertisements upon their owners — and nobody at BMW gets fed feet first into a wood chipper over it — your $24K Kia Shitbox will soon be pitching Happy Meals, weight-loss programs, and boner pills at you.
My 2005 Subaru Forester? Not so much. The only screen in that sucker is the windscreen, as the Brits call it. The clear one I look through to see where in the hell is it that I’m going.
This is absolutely insane, especially for cars that people own. If you own a car and an ad is shown in your car, you should get paid for the ad. And you should need to agree to it first. BMW is supposed to be a luxury brand, and one meant for driving enthusiasts. This is so absurd it’s hard to believe it’s real.
I’ve been trying to mix things up a bit lately, do something out of the ordinary at least one day per week, and today it was a spin along a local stretch of John Steinbeck’s “Mother Road.”
Come fall, which it very much is not, the Geezers usually have a go at the climb to the Morning Star Grocery. This is an out-and-back ride, and mileage varies because not all of us start in the same place. Some, me among them, ride from home; others start from the Smith’s parking lot at Tramway and Central.
All of us get the same seven rolling miles of Mama to Tijeras, where the actual climbing starts as we turn right onto NM 337 and gear down for the 9.7-mile climb to the grocery. There we take five, patronize the shop, have a wee, and assign Manly Points, using a sliding scale that factors in the number of laps around the sun a rider has logged before the day’s exertions.
For me the ride winds up being a 45-mile round trip, more or less, with about 2,500 feet of vertical. A nice day in the saddle.
Today, I had planned to ride solo. No real purpose, beyond doing something other than roll around in the Sandia foothills, and before it got too hot, too; the NWS had issued another heat advisory for any and all mad dogs out in the noonday sun. So eight-ish I pulled the mango Steelman Eurocross from its hook and off we flew down Tramway, the idea being to ride to Tijeras and then … whatever.
From left, Gazette veterans Chris Coursey, Merrill Oliver, and Your Humble Narrator kit up for a California trip.
This would seem an odd choice of bike for anyone who didn’t know my habits. It’s a cyclocross bike, dates to 1998 or thereabouts, and in its present incarnation sports bar-end shifters, an eight-speed drivetrain, Dura-Ace hubs laced to Mavic Open Pro hoops, Paul’s cantis, just the one bottle cage, and a mixed pair of majorly old ’cross knobbies, MXPs from Clément (front) and Donnelly (rear). In 2006, I rode it from Santa Rosa to Hopland for a wedding, but not with those tires.
Mostly I ride it on trails, and so I forget what a great road bike the Eurocross is, especially on shitty roads. So I was having a high old time as we rolled into Tijeras, where on impulse I hung a right on NM 337 and started climbing because why the hell not?
Well, the answer to that was I only had one water bottle, one tube of Clif Blox, and no money, I probably felt swell because I’d had a tailwind pushing me to Tijeras, and sure it’s all downhill from the grocery except for where it isn’t and that headwind ain’t gonna eat itself.
So — believe it or not — I actually did the smart thing for once. I decided to ride to the Otero Trailhead and then turn around, which gave me a 30-mile ride with 1,600 feet of vert’ and nary a bit of bonk or heatstroke.
No Manly Points, though. I’m harsh but fair.
Speaking of which, when we finally hound the brigands out of the government and into prison cells or boneyards, I propose that we seize their fleet of 250 Cadillac Escalades in The Name of the People and use these bloated pimpmobiles to give hungry poor folks free lifts to the grocery. Not everyone has the bike and can make the climb, especially since the swine started croaking the bike lanes.
“DEI” me bollocks. If we’re talking about the bozos these land yachts are intended for it should stand for “Douchebags, Eejits, and Idlers.”
This year’s Tour may be a little too hot to handle, for a couple of stages at least, thanks to fires in the Pyrénées-Orientales area. And anyway, I quit paying attention once the magazines quit paying me money.
Cycling is like … well, like pretty much anything, really. I’d rather do it than watch it.
So this morning, instead of watching UAE Team Emirates-XRG and Tadej Pogačar stomp all comers into a thin paste, I rolled out for a short ride on my favorite Steelman Eurocross, planning to take in the usual mix of asphalt and dirt.
About six miles in, halfway through a circuit of the Elena Gallegos Open Space, the rear tire started going soft. I stopped to add a few psi with a minipump, but what that tire really wanted was a fresh tube.
Well. Shit. What I’m doing here is cyclocross, kinda, sorta. Fuck a fresh tube, I’ll take a fresh bike. Where’s the pit?
About five miles away. In my garage.
So I swoop gingerly down from the EG, along Simms to the Tramway bike path, Comanche, and home, mindful of a rear tire whose tread is getting a little too chummy with its rim.
And I snatch up my second favorite Steelman Eurocross. Boom! Back in the race! Finished first in a field of one on my pit bike, with no further mechanicals. There was an awards banquet, featuring the remnants of Taco Thursday (h/t to stage winner Isaac del Toro) in a flour tortilla with a scattering of arugula, a spoonful of homemade salsa fresca, and a sprinkling of grated Kerrygold Blarney.
The crowd roared.
OK, so maybe that was the vacuum cleaner. Herself has her own race on Sundays, which is all about making El Rancho Pendejo look less like a race pit and more like a home. It’s a much tougher event.
There was a May Day gathering at Civic Plaza yesterday but we gave it a miss. Instead I formed a rolling rally of one, equipped and clad to suit the occasion (in red) and the weather (brisk).
A quarter inch of rain is a whole lot better than none at all.
A quarter inch of rain fell overnight, and at high speed, too. The wind and water blew us out of a sound sleep shortly after 2 a.m., and while the rain stopped the wind was still with us at 11:30 when I took the red Steelman off its hook and rolled out to spend 90 minutes trying to find shelter from it.
We did honor the general strike. We bought nothing and did no paid work; I’ve gotten pretty good at that since retiring in 2022. To feed the starving masses I made three meals out of fridge and pantry: toast, tea, oatmeal, and fruit for breakfast; grilled cheese sandwiches for lunch; and pasta with a sauce of tomatoes, onions, jalapeño, garlic, black olives, red pepper flakes (there’s that red again) and chicken sausage for dinner.
This morning as I arose at 5 a.m. the furnace ticked on, which really lets you know it’s May. Forty-two, said the weather widget. We get summer in March and winter in May and if we’re lucky a little rain sneaks in there somewhere.
Today I will have to re-engage with capitalism in a fairly significant fashion. The pantry is bare, and the People’s Army, like any other, marches on its stomach.
Purple Haze, all in my brain … lately things just don’t seem the same. …
Ridin’ the storm out, waitin’ for the thaw-out On a full-moon night in the Rocky Mountain winter My wine bottle’s low, watching for the snow I’ve been thinking lately of what I’m missing in the city — Gary Richrath, REO Speedwagon
Rolling out of bed this morning after dreaming of bicycles I fell right into the old spin cycle, rolling down Memory Lane.
While inhaling my first cuppa I browsed over to Rivendell where Grant Petersen was musing about a well-used Centurion Accordo he saw recently, parked at a BART station. He made it for a 1985 model, priced in the low-$300s, which set me to recalling my own Centurion, the bike that put me back in the game in 1984.
Mine was a $320 Le Mans 12, red and silver, at 60cm just a skosh too tall for me. Didn’t care. I was an old Schwinn guy trying to quit smoking cigarettes and snorting cocaine, dial back my gargling of the tonsil polish, and in the process maybe shed a few elbees. I weighed 184 at the time, and sometimes — depending upon how many bumps and beers I’d had the night(s) before — it felt more like kilos than pounds.
I was already swimming laps in the overwarm pool at the Pueblo YMCA, and lifting weights. But the scenery never changes in the pool or the gym. So getting back on the bike seemed just the ticket.
And it was! It just took more than one bike, and more than a few years.
• • •
Moving on from Centurions (and their resemblance to his own A. Homer Hilsens) Grant went on to extol the virtues of SunTour components, in particular the Cyclone group, which did battle with the more expensive Shimano 600 group. He writes:
Shimano’s derailers were fine, too, but [in terms of] purely beauty and strength and value, nothing could beat SunTour’s Cyclone derailers. SunTour’s Cyclone went head to head against Shimano 600 (later, Ultegra) and I remember Bridgestone engineers explaining to me in great detail how much better it was … metallurgically, polish, design, and value (it sold for about 20 percent less than Shimano 600). That was SunTour’s strategy to fight Shimano’s better indexing, but partly because the Cyclone stuff was cheaper, people thought it was worse.
Well, wouldn’t you know it? My next bike, a 1985 Trek 560, was equipped with SunTour New Cyclone-S, and I certainly didn’t think it was worse than whatever was on that old Centurion. Sleek and smooth, or so it seemed to me. As for the frameset, its main triangle was double-butted Reynolds 501, the stays True Temper cro-mo, and the fork Tange Mangalloy CCL. This was the bike that got me riding centuries and, eventually, racing.
Racing was good. I wasn’t, but trying to be helped me keep my nose clean (har de har har). And instead of pissing away money on expensive and illegal drugs, I pissed it away on equally expensive but completely legal bicycles and related gear, apparel, and aftermarket “upgrades.”
Like everyone else I left steel, SunTour, and friction shifting behind for aluminum, carbon, and Shimano STI. The old Trek was demoted to a bad-weather/wind-trainer bike, and eventually went away altogether, drifting off the back as technology drove relentlessly forward, Your Humble Narrator clinging to the wheel.
But the Great Wheel also spins, and I eventually found my way back to the idea of that bike.
• • •
We got a bit of winter this week that kept me off the saddle and in something of a mood. Trying to fill the frosty void I spent a little time swapping handlebars on my red Steelman Eurocross. I’d been muttering about getting rid of its deep-drop, long-reach Deda 215 road bar for a while, and with an assist from Old Man Winter I finally got ’er done, swapping it out for a Soma Hwy One bar just like the one on my other Eurocross.
Big Red with its new bar (Cinelli cork bar tape not included).
The red Steelman, like my old Trek, is a blend of Reynolds and True Temper. No classy SunTour jewelry, alas; just clunky, scuffed Shimano ST-R500 Flight Deck brifters running Shimano 600/Ultegra derailleurs and Spooky cantis. I thought, briefly, about going to bar-end shifters, maybe nine-speed; new cassette with more teefers on the fat side, new rear derailleur, new chain, new brake levers and … and maybe not.
Frankly, it felt just a little bit too much like work. Skill set and personal preference dictate that I ride these things rather than wrench on them. Maybe some other time, on some other bleakly cold snow day.
And I couldn’t have gone back to downtube shifters even if I wanted to. There’s a set in the garage, awaiting the callup, but the Eurocross routes its cables along the top tube. No shifter bosses on the downtube. Maybe some bridges are better off burned.
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