The brand Heroin was created as a project of a successful French businessman and avid cyclist, after him coming together with a materials engineer working on cycling R&D. The concept was to develop a new ultimate bike that benefited from the latest in carbon, aero tech, and aesthetics, but in the end was able to produce that rare simple pure riding experience that just couldn’t be lived without… hence the addictive drug name. The result is a limited edition bike, designed in France, crafted in Italy that applies a few innovative solutions in its luxury ride…
Built to be a high performance bike, the Heroin Bike starts with a high stiffness:weight ultra high modulus carbon frame built in Italy with a combination of monocoque and tube-to-tube construction.
To balance stiffness with slippery performance in the wind tunnel, the bike combines some unique tube shaping at the front of the bike with what they call a ‘honeycombed’ texture of dimples on the bike’s leading edges. Molded into the frame, fork, and rims these shallow dimples break up the air moving across the tubing for decreased drag, much like we’ve seen used by Zipp for a couple of decades. Added up across the complete bike, the texturing is said to reduce drag to the order of 10%.
The frame itself has profile not so different from some of the big name bikes we’ve seen in recent years, and includes a slightly dropped set of seatstays around an integrated seatpost clamp. Those stays taper to a tiny section at the dropouts to max out comfort, while tall boxy chainstays and an integrated bottom brackets do the same to ensure good power transfer. With an integrated fork and stem spacer design, the bike has a claimed weight of 750g in a size medium.
No weight claim for the straight blade, tapered fork, but it does get a unique set of windows at the rim. They are designed to smooth airflow at the rim, where you have wind clashing as the wheel spins forward with rotation at the same time as the bike moves forward into the wind.
In addition to the hi-mod frame and fork, Heroin has also had their own post and bar/stem made by their team of Italian craftsmen. The carbon seatpost is a fairly straight forward two-bolt offset design, while the bar is more unique. The carbon handlebar and stem are semi-integrated, which does away with the forward facing bolts, but does mean that adjustability goes away too. The bar itself has a compact bend and a wide flat, forward-sweeping top, and combines with internal routing channels and the internal routing panel of the stem for a super slick look that only exposes the front brake loop.
The Heroin Bike also gets its own custom wheels with the same aero dimpling pattern that makes its way down the leading edges of the frame tubes. The hi-mod, high temp resin rims with their specially developed carbon braking surface are hand built with 20/24 CX-Ray spokes and lightweight alloy hubs.
The bike is available in 5 stock sizes across its limited 349 piece production, but built to each rider. Each frame is fabricated and tuned to the weight and riding style of the buyer and gets individually numbered, before being delivered with a lifetime warranty, with approximately a one month delivery time. The 14,500€ Heroin Bike is available as a complete bike only with a complete Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupset including pedals, Rotor InPower crankset, and Hutchinson Fusion clinchers, and claims a complete weight of less than 6.5kg/14.3 lbs. The Heroin Bike is available to deliver worldwide.
