Today Vitus is the house brand of cycling monolith Wiggle-CRC, which recently unveiled its new UCI Continental team, Vitus Pro Cycling, taking over the squad and name rights of Team Raleigh-GAC.
That’s good news for the domestic scene, which has seen a series of teams fold due to lack of sponsorship, but it’s also good news for us riders. Because coinciding with the team's launch is a new bike from Vitus, the ZX1, and according to Cyclist deputy editor Stu Bowers, it’s really rather good (his review is in Cyclist issue 82, on sale now).
Image 4 of 29
It’s also a storied bike in itself, and in investigating its provenance we stumbled across a rather tasty version we thought you might appreciate.
The new ZX1 is a kammtail-tubed race rig. That is, it’s not aero-at-all costs but it does have truncated tubes that lend it an aero edge, the idea being that ride quality comes first, aerodynamics second (all-out aero tube shapes are not the best in terms of promoting comfort, stiffness or low weight goes the thinking).
It’s been in development for over two years, and the Vitus team decided it would be exclusively disc brake.
Rewind nearly a hundred years, though, and Vitus wasn’t a brand of bikes, but rather a type of tubeset manufactured by ‘Le petit tube de precision’ tube makers (which has the wonderful translation the small tubes of precision) on the edge of Paris.
Bikes were wildly popular back then and France, arguably Europe’s cycling hub, boasted various tube makers, of which another, Ateliers de la Rive in St Etienne, made tubes called ‘Durifort’, and latterly, also ‘Vitus’.
Then the past gets muddy, because at some point by the 1970s, Vitus and Durifort had merged, with Vitus becoming a framebuilder in its own right, supplying Sean Kelly with his Vitus 979, a lugged, aluminium tubed frame with epoxy resin bonded joints.
Kelly road variations on the 979 theme until the early 1990s, winning a host of big races along the way including Paris-Roubaix. Twice. Which is funny to think now, as 979s were prone to de-bonding, and Roubiax and Kelly were notoriously punishing customers.
Yet, the frame was revolutionary. It was light, it was aluminium, it used space-age techniques, and in its own way it helped usher in carbon fibre when outfits such as Look and Alan took the aluminium lug element and paired it with carbon fibre tubes.
The 979, then, was arguably the zenith of the original Vitus company. However to our mind there is one bike that trumps it: the Vitus ZX1, which debuted in 1991.
Image 22 of 29
Wildly less winning, somewhat less popular (only 1,000 were made, although versions of the ZX1 were rebranded Peugeot and Villager), but nonetheless about as arresting as bike designs come.
The old and the new bikes couldn’t be more different, yet something is shared. Both are monocoque and both have aero pretensions.
Admittedly the monocoque bit is misleading; the old ZX1 was moulded in one piece while the new ZX1 is made in several sections bonded together.
Image 24 of 29
Plus, the new ZX1 has more than just back-of-a-beer-mat aero pretensions, having spent significant time undergoing CFD modelling.
But, 27 years on we like to think there’s a nice carry-over between the two. And, well, it’s as good a reason as any to show you this incredible example of an original ZX1 from owner Stefan Schmidhofer. Just check out those Corima Manta bars.
Image 27 of 29
Don’t make ‘em like they used to… No wait, they do. The new Vitus ZX1.
Images courtesy of Stefan Schmidhofer, vive-le-velo.blogspot.com and Vitus, vitusbikes.com
