Road Bike Party 3: The bike + video

The bike that Sam Pilgrim rides in Road Bike Party 3 is a Ridley Noah built up with Shimano Dura-Ace, Vision and FSA parts. What might surprise after watching the video is that it's a stock frame built up with standard parts.

In the original Road Party video Martyn Ashton rode a Pinarello Dogma 2.

“I can honestly say that I didn't break a single thing,” he told us at the time. “The bike is all good... I did have a spare set of wheels from Hope but they are still in their boxes.

In Road Bike Party 2 Martyn Ashton, Chris Akrigg and Danny MacAskill were riding Colnago C59 Disc road bikes with Vision Metron T42 rims laced to Hope III disc hubs, bespoke Hope Trials Zone hydraulic disc brakes, and Shimano Dura Ace Di2 electronic groupsets.

This time around, though, Sam Pilgrim’s bike isn’t from an Italian brand, it’s a Noah from Belgium’s Ridley, a stock frame with a custom lemon and lime paint job – Pilgrim’s usual colours – and the rider’s name on the fork. The finish is bespoke but everything else about the bike is standard.

The carbon-fibre Noah is made with tubes shaped with aerodynamics in mind, although Sam Pilgrim’s riding is more about aeronautics. The frame comes with a tapered head tube to improve front-end stiffness and internal cable routing, neither of which is particularly relevant when you're flying through the air.

Unusually, each leg of Ridley’s F-Split fork has a narrow gap running down the centre. Ridley say that this changes the behaviour of the airflow in that region, drawing air away from the spokes and counteracting the turbulence generated by the wheels to produce more speed.

The shifters and mechs are Shimano Dura-Ace, mechanical rather than electronic, with an 11-28 tooth cassette, and FSA provide the K-Force Light compact (with 50/34-tooth chainrings) chainset.

The stem and seatpost are from FSA’s K-Force lineup and so is the carbon handlebar that has been spun forwards so that the drop sections sit virtually parallel to the ground. A stack of spacers and a flipped stem mean that the handlebar sits pretty high. The brakes look like they’re from FSA too.

The wheels are Vision’s Metron 81 and 55 carbon clinchers with normal spoking – 18 at the front and 21 at the rear. These are built for cutting through the air although we’re guessing that the depth of material in the rims helps with strength when the bike is being landed from high in the air. They’re shod with Continental GP4000 tyres.

The saddle is a Prologo Nago Evo and Prologo provide the bar tape too.

Despite 10 days of filming, with countless jumps, drops and crashes, including a back flip at over 15 feet above ground, and a 7-foot drop onto concrete following an aborted flip, the only new parts required for the bike were two inner tubes, according to the filmmakers.

“We wanted to see just how much punishment the Ridley Noah could take… turns out it was a lot,” said Martyn Ashton.