Together Baden Cooke and David Millar have more than 30 years of professional racing experience at the top level. One, a top sprinter and winner of the Tour de France green jersey, the other, a world class time trialist and wearer of the Tour de France yellow jersey. Both Olympians and both extremely particular when it comes to designing their ideal race bike.
The experience and the desire to ride the best bike they have ever clipped into flows through the Factor Bikes design and engineering team and into the bikes. Baden and David stop at nothing to achieve excellence and create their dream bike.
Taking what they learnt as professional cyclists and the technology created by bf1systems who created the aerodynamic masterpiece, the Twin Vane downtube (unique to Factor Bikes), Baden says: “We want to bring that race heritage into the technology already created by bf1systems and make the best bikes in the world.”
And that is exactly what they are doing, taking the aerodynamic advantages from the Twin Vane downtube and adding their own tweaks and style to create their ideal bike. “Well the Vis Vires which was the original model, although it won the gold medal at Eurobike a few years ago, it didn’t match what we were use to as racing bikes. So we basically modified it and used some similar molds but tweaked it slightly, changed completely the front turns which altered the geometry and it actually is lighter now, I mean this is crazy light, for an aero bike it doesn’t often happen,” David explains. With the pair retiring from professional cycling within 12 months of each other, they were both moving onto new projects within the industry.
Around the same time that David was creating his Chpt./// clothing range with Castelli, Baden was setting up the new reiteration of Factor Bikes with carbon industry manufacturing expert, Rob Gitelis. “We both kind of had the same ideas, we both wanted to tap into our pro experience and our expectations of performance and transfer it to what we’ve learnt and how we ride our bikes now,” said David.
“What has happened a lot at the top end is they are building bikes for the customer and not for racers, we have tried to find a middle ground between that. It has got racing geometry, it’s got the stiffness, it has the lightness, it really has the racing heritage.”
The new generation of Factor Bikes are lighter, stiffer, faster and more aerodynamic than previous editions. Factor Bikes is ready to take the world by storm and create the best racing bike on the market.
“We want to create a bike so good that everybody aspires to ride.”