Pashley launch £6K steel super-bike… and bring back GB components

Pashley are making a splash at this year's Eurobike with the prototype of their new super-high end all steel Sprinter race bike, the Stratford on Avon company is also reviving the GB component brand and the new sprinter features GB bars, stem and seatpost.

Made from Columbus XCR tubing built up using hand made lugs with classic road bike geometry - parallel 74° the frame weighs a claimed 1.7Kg, in all its polished glory. Oh yeah, and it's got a solid silver headbadge.

Noises from Pashley are that Sprinter will be available as a complete bike built up with Campagnolo Super Record and it's likely to cost around £6,000. That sounds a lot but then talking to Paul Vincent, ex-Cycling Plus tech ed and the co-designer of the Sprinter it becomes clear that an awful lot of development time and man hours, have gone in to both the bike and the components it's built up with.

The GB bars (GB stands for Gerry Burgess) are made from aluminium but the stem is milled from a solid billet of ultra-hard bespoke Reynolds stainless steel tubing as are the frame lugs. That Reynolds tubing is so hard that it is very difficult to polish.

There will be more GB products on the way including track nuts, toe clips and a seatpost made in the same way as that stem.

Pashley are marketing GB componenets as a joint venture with Jeremy Burgess son of the late Gerry Burgess and they will be making the components available to other manufacturers… but only if they manufacture in the UK.

The Sprinter is not the only head-turning bike on the way from Pashley… they will be unveiling a fixed bike with a 'fifth stay' in a couple of weeks at the US Interbike show. Fifth stay? Well it's a brace betwen the right hand seat stay, the seat tube and the down tube – basically in the days before over-size tubing a fifth stay was one way of stiffening up a frame. Paul reckons it looks pretty cool too… we'll find out in a couple of weeks.