abarth

Interesting Colnago with Superbe Pro gruppo. I didn't know Suntour components were race in the Tour de France and achieved success. Well, now I know. May be it was a little too late to do anything for the Suntour brand.

https://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll...E:B:SS:US:1123

Bianchigirll 

I am sure at one time Suntour was very competitive and used by lots of teams. nice looking bike, and my size too....

Chombi

It's really nice to see a winning competition bike from the past all set up with Suntour top line components for a change. as everything seem to always be Campy or Shimano.
I always prefered Suntour over Shimano, Along with I think generally a better finish on most of their products, and their seemingly more evolutionary approach to design presented what seems to be a more mature company not too much swayed by trends of the moment. but unfortunately that's what killed them as they misread the quick direction change the industry was taking in the mid 80's with indexed shifting and did not push off on the same initial wave with Shimano. After Shimano got the ball rolling with SIS, they tried in vain to play catch up, but a combination of unfotunate events, trying hard to find a better system than SIS, just pushed them further down the sliperry slope, till they had to close shop in the early 90's. A detailed history of Suntour is in this site:
https://www.users.globalnet.co.uk/~hadland/page35.htm
Maybe Maeda industries should have come up with revolutionary new fishing reels back then to distract Shimano and slow them down?

Chombi

GrayJay

Interesting touch, notice the wheel ballanceing weight on the rim around the valve. Most rims have a internal sleeve at the joint opposite the rim that makes that section heavier. Ambrosio though to counterbalance the weigh offset so you would have perfect balanced wheels when bombing down a mountain pass at 60mph. Having gone that fast on a few occasions, I never noticed any vibrations in my non-ballanced wheels.
I doubt that suntour spent nearly as much advertizing budget on sponsoring pro teams as did Shim&Campy.

CV-6 

Maybe I missed it, but I do not see any proof that this is THE bike.

Alan Edwards

Yes, Yes, I need a picture of the bike crossing the finishline. No picture, nice story, didn't happen. Colnago with Campy is worth more money then one with Superbe, unless you have the picture with the bike crossing the finishline.

RobbieTunes

^ Excellent point.

Were those the pre-syringe days?

Italuminium

No. Smack bang in the middle of it. Peter winnen (the leader of the buckler team) confessed together wtih two other high profile riders many doping sins on a prime time docuMentary. One of the guys in those days even ended up as an amphetamine, homeless junkie.

Picchio Special

Actually not the case - I don't believe Suntour was ever prominent in the pro men's road peloton.

I personally find the ebay bike convincing.

unterhausen

I have a hard time imagining a top pro team using Suntour back then. I'd need to see proof.

Picchio Special

Buckler did use Suntour. I believe this is the bike in question:

https://www.super-cycle-clothing.com/images/Buckler1.jpg

Note that is this if the stage in question, it's not the same as the ebay bike. I don't know how many tall Buckler riders were winning Tour stages in those years - I don't believe very many.

VeloBrox

SunTour patented the slant-parallellogram rear derailleur in 1964, enjoying a monoply on this superior technology for 20 years. Several competetive cyclists found mid-end SunTours to perform better than Campagnolo in those years. Campa's dominance in factory teams had more to do with factory politics, I believe.

conspiratemus1

There were never pre-syringe days, sadly.

Funny about Suntour never being able to get their indexing right, which killed the consortium. I finally sourced a pair of Suntour Superbe 6/7-sp indexing downtube shifters (just like the ones on the eBay bike) to go with the Superbe derailleurs on my rando bike. They have a nice big drum which allows them to make the derailleur walk nicely across an 8-speed Campy Exa-Drive cassette freehub, in retrofriction mode. (I love Ergo shifting on the handlebars but I don't really see the value of indexing downtube shifters.) So, the other day, just to see what would happen, I yielded to temptation and, like a first-time visitor to Las Vegas nervously depositing a quarter into a slot machine, I moved the little dial to "7-index". And you know what? It indexed perfectly on that 8-speed cassette. Not just OK, but perfectly. (Sure, you get 7 gears indexed and the eighth goes beyond the detents and "indexes" against the limit screw, but it really does work.)

Fearing the risk of addiction, I quickly moved it back to friction and regained my virtue, but I still think, "My my my.... Whoo'd a thunk it?"

abarth

Here is a picture of Gerrit Solleveld. Suntour was one of Buckler team sponsor.

matt0ne

That is a superbe bike - pun intended..

rootboy 

which brings to mind, what happens to all those stage-winning bikes from the TdF? There must be a bunch of them floating around, somewhere.

Gary Fountain

Thanks for the tip. I have an old pro racing Colnago with Suntour Superbe Pro Gruppo too. I will try the 8 speed trick over the next couple of days if time permits.

I know mine is an old Belgian team bike that I got from a bike shop owner friend of mine but he had forgotten the actual team name when I bought it from him. It's probably not a 'top flight' team though.

I am a devoted Campy fan but I always held a secret admiration for Suntour - probably because of the slant parallelogram rear derailleur and their 'underdog' status. I'm glad I have the Colnago.

I remember drooling over the Buckler team copy Colnago Master frames in my local bikeshop in the late 80's or early 90's. Nice colour scheme.

Flying Merkel

Nice looking bike, but where is the documentation? For the money, one needs more than a story on Ebay to point to.