Brooks saddles were coveted by racers in Soviet times. Quite often I will come across an old time racer while I'm at the National teams workshop who will fawn over my Brooks saddle and ask me a million questions about it. They were extremely hard to come by in Soviet times, although one was found in the back of the workshop (B-15) from the 1960s. I gave it to a friend who always wanted a Brooks but couldn't afford one. He rides now rides it every day!

How about a Brooks that can be set back on the seatpost further? This has been discussed at length on the iBob list and some theorize that it may not be possible on saddles with full skirts like the B17 or Team Pro. But it's a problem for people who want to put Brooks saddles on modern bikes with currently fashionable steeper seat tube angles. The problem is further compounded by a dirth of seatposts with enough setback to get the saddle back far enough.

The NAHBS looked like Brooks had signed some sort of exclusive agreement requiring that 90% of all show bikes sport Brooks saddles. Do you have a muscular marketing director named Boris who flys around the world visiting small framebuilder shops making offers that can't be refused?

The other possibility is that people who craft beautiful frames all know that only one saddle will look good on their bike, and it's a Brooks.

+1

That's the only minor gripe I have with all 4 of my Brooks saddles

Brooks made the Professional first. When it was time for a freshening, probably to promote upgrading, they added the large rivets and called it the Team Professional. Everything about the two models are exactly the same except for the rivets. They sold them both for quite a while. They just dropped the Professional 3 or 4 years ago.

The rivets on the Professional, I believe, were the smallest of the three rivet sizes. The Team Pro is the only one that uses the large copper rivets. The Pro and the Conquest use the smaller rivets, and everthing else uses the medium rivets.

(The Professional Select was a special that they did for a couple of years in the early 80s.)

See <https://www.brooksarchives.info/brooks%20/catalogs/1986%20brooks/bottombackleft.html> for the Pro and Team Pro together on a 1986 Brooks poster/catalog. This poster also tells us that honey-colored leather and the 'S' version of the Team Pro were new in '86.

Bill Laine
New Orleans

How about offering a B17 with chrome rails as you have with the Pro? I prefer the B17, but I don't like copper rails on my vintage bikes.

I'm another one who hates Flash. Unfortunately, I only have a dial up connection available in our area (not even dsl or cable available here), so I usually won't even bother to look at a web site that uses Flash. I've checked your web site out at work where we have a very fast connection, but Flash sites like yours are still painfully slow. Making it more user friendly by making the pages simple and quick to navigate and load would be much better.

BTW, this has not hurt your sales as I own 3 of your saddles (swift ti, team pro, and B17 champion special) and love them, but I got most of my info on them from other web sites

Scott