His bike in detail:
- Columbus special record tubing with specially cut pressed steel lugs and Campagnolo forged dropouts
- custom aluminium headset
- Campagnolo Record small flange hubs with removed dust caps and hollow axles
- Clement Seta Pista tires filled with helium
- 175mm Capagnolo Record prototype crank with 52t Record chainring
- 14t alloy cog
- 3/32 Regina Record chain, custom drilled
- Selle Royal Eddy Merckx saddle
- Campagnolo Record 27,2mm x 180mm seatpost, drilled below insertion into seattube
- Campagnolo Record Strada SL pedals, customized with cut down cages, titanium spindles, Christophe steel clips, Binda straps
- Cinelli Campione del mondo handlebars, 40mm wide, drilled
- custom Pino Morroni titanium stem
In total the bike weighed about 5,5Kg and not only a few people thought that the bike was about to deflate when Merckx would start to pedal. It withstood and Merckx rode 49,431 with this bike in 60Minutes. After that the record remained untouched until 1984, when Francesco Moser broke it using a specially designed bicycle and meticulous improvements in streamlining. Over 15 years, various racers improved the record to more than 56 km. However, because of the increasingly exotic design of the bikes and position of the rider, these performances were no longer reasonably comparable to Merckx's achievement. So in 2000 the UCI required a "traditional" bike to be used. When time trial specialist Chris Boardman had another go at Merckx's distance 28 years later, he beat it by slightly more than 10 meters.
Sources: wiki, stahlrahmen-bikes
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