Guest post of sorts. That will appeal primarily to the small subset of PressingPausers who fancy themselves cycling nerds. Ben Farver is the Founder of Argonaut Cycles, a custom/boutique/ultra bougie bicycle manufacturer based in Bend, OR.

As concise and clear a design philosophy as you’re ever going to read. Ben in Bend for the win.

The Wrong Problem

The industry has been racing toward aerodynamics and stiffness for a decade. Neither one is the most important thing about a bicycle.

Ben Farver, Founder of Argonaut Cycles

Every major bike brand is in a race right now to make the most aerodynamic frame on the market.

I think they’re optimizing for the wrong thing.

That’s not a contrarian position for its own sake. Aerodynamics matter. Weight matters. The gains are real. But the conversation the industry is having about what makes a bicycle better has narrowed to a point where it’s almost entirely about numbers that most riders will never meaningfully feel.

And in that narrowing, the thing that actually determines whether a ride is transcendent or just fast has gotten lost.

Aerodynamic gains only matter if you’re racing. Ride quality matters on every single ride.

Here’s how the industry argument goes. Make the frame slipperier, reduce rolling resistance, optimize the tire interface. Get the rider from point A to point B faster with less effort. That’s the whole conversation.

And I understand it. Going fast on a road bike is one of the closest feelings we get to flying. Thirty miles an hour, two and a half feet above the ground. Faster is better. I’m not arguing otherwise.

But those aerodynamic gains only pay real dividends at the elite level. They matter in a race, where the difference between first and fourth is measured in seconds. They matter when you’re in a peloton, and drafting dynamics actually change what a more slippery frame is worth.

For everyone else, the gains are marginal at best. And most riders aren’t racing. Most riders are out for three hours on a Saturday morning, trying to find what makes cycling worth doing.

That thing has a name. I call it dynamic response.

It’s the feeling of the frame working with you, rather than just under you. The load-and-release quality that makes pedaling feel effortless when it should and explosive when you want it to. The vertical compliance absorbs the road without throwing you off your line. The torsional integrity that holds the bike dead stable at fifty miles an hour on a descent.

These aren’t vague experiential claims. They’re engineering outcomes. Specific, measurable, designable. They just require a different set of questions than the industry currently asks.

The bikes that win the aerodynamic argument all ride the same. That’s not a coincidence. It’s the cost of optimizing for one variable.

The irony is that I’m not ignoring the aerodynamic conversation. The RM4 is in development and will be more aerodynamically efficient than the RM3. Slipperier. Faster. That matters.

But the design intention isn’t to make it faster at the cost of everything else. It’s to make riding faster and more satisfying. To push both ends of the spectrum at the same time.

That’s the argument we get to have that nobody else does. Because we’re not starting from the aerodynamic frame and trying to add ride quality back in. We’re starting from ride quality and building outward.

Most of the industry has it backwards.

The RM3 is like the classic Porsche 911. The RM4 will be the one sitting next to it in the garage that makes you realize how much further the idea could go. The difference is that both are built around how they feel to drive. Not just how quickly they get around a track.

There’s a reason people who get on our bikes for the first time tell me they’re stiffer than the bikes they came from. I know for a fact they’re usually not. The frame they got on isn’t as stiff as their previous bike by any objective measure.

But it has better power transfer. It has that load-and-release quality that people associate with stiffness because it’s the closest sensation they have a word for. What they’re actually feeling is the frame doing its job well.

That’s the problem worth solving.

Not how quickly the frame moves through the air. But how well it moves with the person on it.

The industry will keep improving aerodynamics. Tubes will get more optimized. Drag coefficients will keep dropping. And those bikes will keep winning races.

What they won’t do is give you the feeling that made you fall in love with riding in the first place.

That one is ours to build.

Maybe a better title for this post would’ve been, “How To Think”. And hell yes I want one.