My '90s Dream Bike
When I walked into The Pro’s Closet for the first time, I saw this Lotus Sport 110 hanging above the front desk. For a few minutes, it was the only thing in the world that held my attention.
You can can still find brand new VHS tapes on eBay!
I remembered, as a kid, seeing the Tour de France for the first time. It was the mid-90s and I'd been gifted a set Tour de France VHS tapes. My friend and I loved watching 1994 because it featured Djamolidine Abdoujaparov, who had a wild, elbows out sprinting technique. He suffered a violent crash before the finish of the first stage, and because we were young boys, we would rewind to the beginning over and over just to watch this crash again.
Boardman was the first British rider to wear the Yellow Jersey since Tom Simpson in 1962. Photo: Boardman Bikes
This meant I also watched Chris Boardman in the 1994 Prologue over and over. During his warm up he was surrounded by cameras, sitting pensive and stiff in his Gan kit and Giro aero helmet. To my young eyes he looked like a comic book superhero, and he had a bike to match: the Lotus Sport 110. As a kid, it reminded me of my favorite plane, the SR-71 Blackbird, a machine built to be the fastest ever.
Boardman rode perfectly. He pedaled like a metronome, caught and powered emphatically past his minute man, and in the end averaged 55.152 kph, riding the fastest tour stage in history (Rohan Dennis won the 2015 Prologue averaging 55.456 kph, pushing Boardman’s result to 2nd fastest).
In the end, Boardman stuck with me more than Abdoujaparov. It was a pivotal moment in my childhood. I liked Greg LeMond because my dad liked Greg LeMond, but Chris Boardman was the first cycling hero I discovered on my own. He made me dream about riding bikes and going fast. The bike I dreamt of riding was his Lotus.
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Fast From the Beginning: The Lotus Sport 108
Burrows also designed the Giant TCR, the first compact road frame. Photo: Bicycle Retailer
The Lotus Sport's radical carbon “Z-shaped” frame was developed in the early-90s by Mike Burrows (1943-2022), who understood the aerodynamic potential of sculpted monocoque frames. The chainstays are enormous to help make up for the Z-shaped frame’s absence of a downtube and seat stays. Without them, the bike only has to break through the air twice, increasing its aerodynamic efficiency. The exposed bottom bracket shell is also shaped like a ship’s bow so that it can help smooth the air passing over the back half of the bike.
Lotus joined Burrows to help develop the bike after one of their test drivers, who happened to be an avid cyclist, stumbled upon the design when visiting Burrows’ shop.
Thanks to their involvement in Formula 1, Lotus had extensive knowledge of aerodynamics and advanced composite technology and could provide facilities for state-of-the-art wind tunnel testing and carbon fiber molding. They acquired the rights to the project in 1992 and the bike was developed by a consulting division, Lotus Engineering, to showcase Lotus' design capabilities on a global stage — the 1992 Olympics in Barcelona.
Boardman riding the Lotus Sport 108 on his way to gold. Photo: Leo Mason/Corbis
Rudy Thomann, a development engineer, and Richard Hill, Lotus' Chief Aerodynamicist, had only 6 months to complete the project. They built molds and tested different ideas after hours and on weekends. The result was the first iteration of the Lotus Sport, the 108, which Boardman rode to gold in the 4000m pursuit and set a world record. Britain hadn’t won an Olympic cycling event for decades, so a British rider setting records on a British bike was a huge deal.
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Bringing That Speed to the Road: The Lotus Sport 110
The Lotus Sport 108 (left) vs. 110 (right).
After Boardman’s success, Lotus saw the potential in marketing a production version, which became the Lotus Sport 110. Lotus made a small batch but contracted out the rest of the production to a South African company, Aerodyne Space Technologies, which also had manufacturing ties to Formula 1.
The main difference between the 108 and the 110 is that the 110 doesn’t feature the radical “mono-blade” frame design of the 108. The 108 had a single fork leg and single chainstay on the right side to reduce the frontal area of the bike as much as possible. The 110 keeps the general Z-shape of the frame, but for production purposes Lotus opted to use chainstays and fork legs on both sides.
When you look at the 110 head on it’s still incredibly narrow, measuring under 2 inches across at the headtube. The integrated seatmast on the frame is also surprisingly thin, at less than 9mm thick, but still very stiff.
The 110 also featured interchangeable rear dropouts, which allowed you to switch between track and road spacing, and added a rear derailleur hanger for road use. With brake mounts and internal cable routing, the frame was meant to be fully usable both on and off the track.
Boardman used the 110 to dominate the 1994 Tour de France Prologue and later set a new World Hour Record. To have one, you had to put down $2999.99 (in early nineties dollars) just for a frameset.
Colby Pearce's American Hour Record Bike
Pearce's 1995 Hour Record setup is a bit different than how the bike is setup now. Note the HED wheels and SRM cranks.
Colby Pearce, a Boulder native, a professional rider, and an Olympian, purchased this Lotus Sport 110 at full retail. With it, Pearce set a new U.S. Hour Record in 1995, riding 50.191 km in an hour on an outdoor track in Colorado Springs.
Seeing the bike now, in person, it’s still impressive. The carbon layup looks flawless, and the clearcoat is polished to a high gloss finish. Picking it up, the bike feels surprisingly solid and sturdy, not hollow or toyish like I had expected. At just over 18 pounds, it’s not the lightest, but it’s not heavy either.
The drivetrain features a classic Mavic 631 “starfish” crankset. Pearce had it painted black to match the frame and, if you look closely, you can see a slight bevel where material on the ends of the crankarms has been filed off. This is because the 175mm crankarms (most track bikes run around 165mm crank arms for clearance on banked track surfaces) don’t quite clear the massive chainstays.
With the ends filed down, it provides just over a 1mm of clearance. It’s so little that if you push on the crank arm with a enough force you can actually make it touch the carbon. It probably wasn’t an issue when Pearce set the U.S. Hour Record as he actually used one of the earliest SRM power meter cranks for the attempt. It was wired, and Pearce reportedly spent 7 hours routing the wire through the internal front derailleur path to keep it looking clean.
The frame has a braze on for mounting a front derailleur, but in the bike’s lifetime it’s been unused. Even when riding TTs on the road, Pearce chose to stick with a single front chainring.
The front wheel is a carbon HED 3 and the rear is a kevlar "Russian disc." These old Russian discs were popular with track riders and usually have “666” written on them in Cyrillic looking script. They are made using overlapping, tensioned sheets of kevlar instead of spokes. Because these sheets are stretched like a drum head the wheel is impressively loud when ridden, especially on the road as it amplifies shifting noises and road imperfections.
The kevlar almost looks like dark wood grain as it ages but, like the crank, it has been spray painted black to match the bike. The hub hardware is all machined from titanium and the end result is a wheel that is extremely light. It is, however, quite flexy under high power so it’s much more suited to sustained, uniform efforts (like the hour record) rather than sprinting.
An interesting design choice is the mechanism of the machined seatmast cap and saddle rail clamp. The cap has two bolts. To mount it to the frame, holes had to be drilled directly into the seat mast. The holes are slightly ovalized with a drill to provide a very small amount of saddle height adjustment.
The seatmast cap is further secured to the frame with a pair of set screws that simply screw in until they contact the seatmast and hold everything in place with friction. The saddle rail clamp is milled from a solid block of aluminum and instead of a traditional style clamp it simply uses four bolts to wedge the saddle rails between the bolt heads and some tabs machined into the block.
The cockpit has custom Vision Tech one piece alloy aerobars that measure 38cm outside-to-outside. An adjustable Look Ergo stem allowed Pearce to get the bars low enough to run an ultra aero position where the bars sit almost in line with the top tube. On Boardman’s original 108, the bars were attached directly to the fork crown, giving him a similarly low position, but for the production version, a more conventional threadless stem setup was preferable. Boardman used a similar adjustable stem setup to get the bars low enough on his 110.
Colby Pearce still owns this bike, and unfortunately, after 10 years in our museum, we've sent it back to him. It's a bike I'll miss a lot. He told us that it had a special effect on the rider’s psyche:
There aren’t many bikes I have an emotional attachment to. [A bike’s] a tool that I use. But this one—it was a special time in my career, where I felt like I really rose to the best of my own abilities, and this bike helped me do that. [I don’t know] whether or not it was because I had a faster bike than a lot other guys, or whether that speed inspired the best out of me. Because you’re on this super fast bike, you don’t want to look like a jackass and get beat. In a way it really helped me dig deep as an athlete ... that’s why I love cycling. It’s both machine and man meshed together.
Too Fast for the UCI
In 1996, Boardman rode a version of the 110 to set the World Hour Record at a stratospheric 56.375 km. Soon after though, UCI rule changes essentially nullified the result.
New frame designs, especially those aimed at timed pursuits like the hour record and road TTs were, in the eyes of the UCI, getting out of hand. It was open season and all sorts of wild body positions and frame shapes were being experimented with. The Lotus Sport sat at the pinnacle of this arms race.
The only other bikes of the time which came close to its level were the GT Superbike, which enjoyed nowhere near the same notoriety, and Graeme Obree's homemade rocketship, Old Faithful. To try and put an end to all this, the UCI drafted the Lugano Charter in 1996, approving it in 2000. Radical aero designs like the Lotus Sport were outlawed as frame shapes and dimensions were bound by strict guidelines.
Amazingly, the Lotus still compares very favorably to modern designs in terms of aerodynamics, which leads me to wonder where bikes would be today had regulations not stifled their progress. Nevertheless, the Lotus Sport remains iconic, and in the nineties it was the undeniable king of speed.
I looked at the bike constantly while writing this. I touched its smooth finish, placed my arms in the aerobars, and felt instantly connected to the feats of its past. More than anything I wanted to just get on and pedal hard. To go as fast and far as I could. It has that power.
It is a machine whose legacy, like the SR-71 Blackbird, has come to outlive its own relevance. It's an artifact of a time long past, that gets forgotten more and more with each day. But the quest for speed is eternal. Though grounded, and kept on display indefinitely, it will always have that aura of being, at least for a time, the fastest bike in the world.
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