Ok, everybody these days is into track bikes. I have had a few them that were made by popular companies who have made great road bikes, but I have never been happy with them. A track bike is different. A good track bike is made to ride on a track, and the builder has to know something about track racing in order to build a nice bike that will work.

Made for Pure Speed

I've had some bikes that have had too long a wheel base or too steep a seat angle because somebody thought you needed to be forward to "spin". Last year at the National Championships in Texas, on a 250m track with steep banking, my teammate in the madison actually fell off the track twice because his bottom bracket was too low to ride the top of the track slowly. Once he fell off when we were 3/4 of the way from getting a lap alone. When I was expecting to throw him in I saw him in a tangled mess on the apron, wrapped up in his baby blue aero track bike that must have been the most worthless piece of nice looking crap in the race. It's not the bike that makes the difference when you have a good bike, but when you are on the track with a bad bike then it for sure IS the bike.

I got my CSK a while ago and built it up a few months before I actually had the chance to ride it. I was impressed with the look of the bike. This bike has a super hot, pro look. Everything is right on the paint job; its glossy and high quality. I dropped a wrench on it and it didn't chip, and once I got it built up, wrapping the chain around the rear dropouts to transport it hasn't hurt the paint yet.

The tubes are fat an aero-shaped, and there is a nose cone on the head tube. You dont really see this much. Everything that I have read says that the front end of the bike is really important to get right if you want the bike to be aero. I remember seeing some tests that showed the fastest frames to be those with nose cones.

Precision Cut Out

The rear wheel cut out is placed correctly on this bike. I had a bike once where the cut out didn't line up with the wheel and and another one even had a cutout that was meant to match a 650c rear wheel! CSK got that part right.

Another cool part of the frame is the extended downtube—it goes below the bottom bracket shell to fair the rear wheel.

Fair Enough

Geometry wise, everything is the way it should be. This is a bike that you can race in any race on the track. It is aero enough to be a pursuit bike, but it is made to ride mass start races. The handling is simple and predictable. Contrary to popular belief, you want a track bike to be stable, not all twitchy. When you are ripping around at more than 50kph at the ADT Center, you want a bike that goes where you point it and stays on that line, especially in a madison, when you are making hard exchanges in the banking. The bike has to be rock solid. This bike is just that. Unlike most aero track frames, this has a high bottom bracket so you never have to worry about clipping a pedal.

Be careful of aero frames, a lot of manufacturers just put track dropouts on their time trial frames and call it a track bike. These bikes are suitable for mass start racing. Trust me, I didn't repeat as national madison champion because of the crappy aero track frame of my teammate!

One really good thing about this bike is the small head tube. Because the head tube is small I can set up almost any position on this bike. I can run a flat stem with aerobars for pursuits, or a stem flipped up for mass starts. This same bike can fit a lot of different riders for a lot of different tracks. Positioning on the track is a lot different than on the road because of the G-forces in the turns and the fact that you pedal a lot quicker. You generally want to sit back more than on the road to weight the rear end and have your bars a bit higher to relieve stress on your back and arms.

When you get down to the details, things get impressive. This bike has a replaceable steel insert that bolts into the dropouts so that repeated fastening of the wheel bolts doesn't destroy the frame. Watch out—some bikes have these on the outside of the dropouts where you can see them, but not on the interior surfaces. CSK puts them on all the surfaces of the bike. Knowing track racing makes a difference. Once your dropouts get gurned up its hard to tension the chain correctly. There is also plenty of room in the dropouts to run a few different gears without having to carry two chains (which I have had to do on some bikes).

The Rear End

I am not a guy that really is too into bikes. For road bikes, almost everyone makes a good bike, and in my opinion they are almost all the same, with a few exceptions. But track bikes are another story. There are a lot of bikes out there that just aren't real track bikes. Luckily for you, you can get a CSK and be assured that it is a real track bike that wont let you down.

CSK stands for Chang Shen Kai... a real guy who loves the track and who goes to almost every World Cup. He knows track racing and his bikes show it. The sizing is right, the geometry is right, the details are there, and all you have to do is pedal fast and turn left.