I believe what 65er was alluding that it is a sum of all parts including frame that would make a certain bike that belong to a certain bicycle category. Just because one stuff a drop bar on a relaxed frame with Deore LX components would make it a road bike. Nor is slapping a slick tires on a Kona Shred makes it a hybrid. In your case, yours is a fast hybrid. You can have a crazy saddle to handlebar drop, still doesn't mean it is a road bike.
Why not just post this question over at the Road Cycling section.

Mrs. Road Fan has a Cannondale 800 Road Warrior, aluminum with a carbon fork, low rise bars, and 28 mm 700c wheels. It's been converted to compact rather than triple. It's really more of a flat bar road bike than any kind of dual purpose bike. With the 28s the aluminum jitter is not quite so bad.

I just did 130 miles on my FX.2 and I can tell you that it is no road bike on any level. The bike is a performance Hybrid, nothing more nothing less. To call it an upright road bike is giving no justice to a road bike or a hybrid. They are apples and oranges. The term upright road bike is an oxymoron, there is no such thing. The FX is a hybrid period, there is no argument on that fact. The premise of this thread is nonsense & I have avoided it for that reason. Having just competed in an endurance event on my FX against a majority of road bikes I can testify that there is no comparison in performance and speed.

Haha Siu too funny! :D

Actually it's 65er's contention that the frame geometry defines the type of bike. I consider my Marin to be a hybrid. I'm just interested in 65er's insight. His knowledge of frame geometry earns him money. Perhaps he doesn't want to give away the secrets for free.

Upright road bike? I've never heard that phrase before. Comparing the performance of your bike vs. the road bikes you competed against leaves out the most important factor, the engine.

I am glad someone gets it... Q knows he has a hybrid that is designed much along the same lines as an FX and everyone and their blind dog can see this.

This does not mean it cannot function well as a road bike or handle off road situations but that it just isn't optimized for any singular purpose... a change to drop bars would offer a more aero position and swapping the wheels and tyres to something more cyclo cross oriented would make it a decent bike off the road.

I am in the process of designing a new frame here and it will have the same main angles as Q's Marin but won't look a thing like it and no-one will mistake it for being a hybrid.

Not exactly... you took my comments about slack angles being typical of touring bikes and steeper angles being more typical of road bikes way out of context.

We can't forget the fork in the equation either as it has great effect on the handling and in many cases, the rider position.

My Trek has what is essentially a suspension corrected fork as part of it's overall design which brings the front end up and has the kind of trail you want in a touring bike or city bike as it makes it stable and allows it to handle front loads quite well.

Most hybrid bicycles have similarly designed forks as they are made to accommodate some fairly wide tyres and provide similar trail to a touring bike to make them more stable... your average hybrid rider does not want a bike that handles this quickly.

If you take a mountain bike with a front suspension and replace it with a non corrected fork you will drop the front end and the bike will have a steeper head angle and less trail which can make it a lot twitchier.

I've never suggested otherwise. I'm among those that believe the FX bikes (and my Marin) are hybrids.

You are still avoiding my question.

If the bike you are designing has the same geometry as mine, why won't it be mistaken for a hybrid? What about it will prevent it from suffering such an ill fate? Or is that more trade secrets that you can't afford to reveal?

Many companies are marketing "flat bar road bikes" and your Marin is promoted as just this.

With a more upright position your wind resistance is higher and if you put the same engine in a pick up truck and a Ferrari the Ferrari will go faster and use less energy because it it is far more aerodynamic.

Wind resistance is calculated as the square of your speed... 30kmh is pretty easy to do while riding at 40kmh requires almost twice as much energy.

It is nice we can agree on the FX and your bike as being hybrids.

Seat tube and head tube angles fall into a pretty narrow range for road oriented bikes so if I design a bike with the same seat and head tube angles as your Marin that in itself will not make it a hybrid... add to that the fact it will have 20 inch wheels and break in half for travel and I think we can rule out a hybrid design.

By definition a hybrid is melding the features of one thing and adding 'x' amount of the features of another thing. Ergo, hybrid could be a road bike modified with rides to allow to go off-road; a hybrid could be a mountain bike modified with road tires. Further, what suffices to be a hybrid in NYC is not per se a hybrid in Kansas, although a person in either location could each be delivering mail on their hybrid. Another aspect of 'hybrid' are the misnomers and mis-marketing, if you ride your road bike up to near the top of Mt Hood, you are not mountain biking even though you climbed a mountain. There is also the specific debate in this thread wherein it has been claimed that a Trek FX is not the hybrid it was once marketed to be. I can pass judgement on what I have seen, which was a Trek 7.5 FX with skinny road slicks for tires. The sales person told me this was a 'fitness bike', and while he offered me a very good price, I ride trails and that bike needed new tires to get there. However, there is the Trek line running from 7000 to 7500, which do have the wider tires that trails demand.

Add to this the fact that given the money, you could buy a Trek 7.x FX and replace the tires with a 700 x 35c tires and thereby be able to off-road/off-path your trips. A stock Trek 7.5 FX is hardly a hybrid in my view, but if you are willing to go up or down some dirt trail on a slick, more power to your sense of adventure. I don't know what makes a hybrid that you own, but for the hybrid I own it must be celeste in color and the tires must be muddy.

Nice post, Mike.

It's amazing what posting to Bike Forums does to a man.

Congratulations! It's a ... Hybrid! :D

I am tired of Goggling, What does a standard FX weigh, without shipping and no add on features.....??...
Just wondering..Richard

:p:p:p:p:p:p:p:p:p) Richard :thumb:

Dude, my handlebars are four inches below my saddle. I'm always as aero as a roadie in the drops, more aero than a roadie on the hoods or bar tops where most of them spend most of their time on the bike. Think TT bullhorns.

That's not quite right: the FORCE due to wind resistance varies with the square; the POWER - the energy used per second - varies with the CUBE. So a 40kmh speed requires 2.4 times as much as rider power as 30kmh, neglecting rolling resistance (power for which goes with the square of speed.)

Yeah 65er! Can you even count to 65?

..Says the man who yesterday told someone to buy a fixed gear frame without realizing that the buyer wouldn't be able to mount brakes on it.

And I'm not going to throw any stones either. I'm sure I've made at least one mistake - a minor one, obviously, a long time ago.

Anyway, the important thing to realize is that optimizing for maximum speed on a bicycle is productive than most people imagine: if you halved drag - which would be an incredible achievement - you'd only get a 25% increase in maximum speed. That, and that applying the "It works for Lance Armstrong!" rule to a hybrid ridden for errands and pleasure jaunts by a non-athletic rider is silly and often counterproductive even for achieving gains in speed - because that cube versus square thing for the two sorts of drag.

The problem is that bike terminology is messed up. A road bike is actually a road RACING bike, and many hybrids aren't hybrids of road and MTB bikes at all - they're just (non-racing) road bikes with flat bars and don't even have the tyre clearances of a respectable tourer. These bikes are very much like 1950s British club bikes, but with more gears. So we end calling a bike that has no MTB heritage at all a "hybrid." It's silly, but we're stuck with it.

The worst thing is that most bikes today are design disasters compared to what they could be. They're marketed to people who know damn all and want a bike that looks a bit like Lances, and a bit like a macho MTB bike. When perhaps what people should really be riding is something like a Moulton, with the cost brought down through mass production:

http://www.moultonbicycles.co.uk/models/TSR30.html

"a hybrid ridden for errands and pleasure jaunts by a non-athletic rider is silly "

You are silly to think the regulars here fit that description. You do not ride a hybrid and you have a contemptuous view of those of us who do. I bet any of us could drop you like a bad habit.

I'm afraid I can only say that I think that you are a very silly man.

The gap in fitness between someone who rides a bike regularly and one with talent and who is in hard physical training to ride as fast as possible, is substantial, whatever it does to your ego. And my God, training seriously is punishing - if you're not training hard enough to damage your longterm health, then you're probably not training hard enough, even at a serious amateur level.

Saying the above doesn't indicate my "contempt" for the people who use this forum. Just that I don't pander to fantasists who like to imagine that they are something they are not, and who are insulted when other people won't support their fantasy. There is nothing at all wrong with being a reasonably fit cyclist who has chosen a sensible general purpose bike and rides for enjoyment, rather than out of a mixture of masochism, over-aggression, and the need for an excuse to shave his legs!

As for riding a hybrid: I think the term is meaningless. But if you took one of the drop-handled Trek conversions that have appeared on this forum and put it next to my crosser, then I doubt you'd be able to tell them apart. (Although my crosser would have more class, because it has Campagnolo hardware - and, as the saying goes, "No one ever got a Shimano tatoo.") And the Kona I just gave to a friend was a roadized MTB - a hybrid. I hope this reduces the "There's a spy in our midst!" feeling that you seem to have.

In summary: no one should be ashamed not to be Lance Armstrong. And if you are ashamed, or get annoyed when people casually mention that you're not Lance, nor even very Lance-shaped, then you might want to seek professional advice - you can probably get some kind of medication...

Also: I don't optimize my crosser as if it is a TDF bike. And qms knows this, because he asked me. I have 35mm tyres on and I'm switching to 40s - not 23s. I have extra wide drops on, for better steering on dirt, although they hurt the aerodynamics. And I'm fitting a higher shorter stem to improve my ability to lift the front wheel for taking drops, and because I'll see more around me - again this will hurt the aero. So am I insulting myself, by admitting that I'm not racing in the TDF and optimizing the bike for the riding I actually do? Which is solo, and on bad roads and dirt, usually between 15mph and about 22 when I'm on the flat? Instead of in a peleton, moving at 35mph on a manicured road in another rider's slipstream?

Once again, qms, I can hardly be patronizing people by giving them advice that I follow myself! You might disagree with me - you could even try doing so intelligently, researching the points at issue instead of using "Everyone knows-" and "Lance Armstrong rides 23mm tyres-" as your only arguments - but to accuse me of giving advice that I wouldn't follow myself is unfair.