The in-house testing lab at the Morgan Hill, California, headquarters of Specialized Bicycle Components is a gleaming example of engineering efficiency: a spacious, well-lit shop where brutish machines rip and wrench bicycle frames and parts to—and past—their limits.
On this particular morning, a special frame sits on the frontal-impact rig. The Venge is an intimidating broadsword of a bike, with a menacing coat of matte-black paint bisected on the down tube by a murderous red slash. A bright white decal spells "McLaren" on the top tube, the logo of Britain’s storied supercar maker and F1 racing team, and Specialized’s longtime technology partner.
The pedal-fatigue test is long and numbingly dull. Test engineers fix the fork to a rigid point on the test jig, and the rear dropouts to an extension that simulates how a frame pivots over the rear tire’s contact patch. The final piece is a dummy drivetrain—including a cassette, chain, and overbuilt crankarms (both oriented at an angle to sustain maximum power transfer). Over the next 14 hours, the test machine alternately slams each crankarm with an excess of 1,200 N of force for 100,000 cycles—essentially a 120-rpm sprint for 14 hours straight. The test is meant to simulate cumulative pedal forces from years of riding.
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Most of the time, frames get pummeled on the machine for the duration of the test cycle, then move on to the next phase of assessment. But this time, when the test finishes, there’s a problem: The frame is cracked.
For a McLaren, the failure is doubly damning. Specialized doesn’t have a separate set of fatigue benchmarks for the McLaren series, but these frames should be the best of the best of what Specialized makes. Launched in 2011, the McLaren series Venge features a carbon fiber construction that McLaren engineers ran through proprietary software designed to tune the entire frame to the absolute limit of technology and materials. Manufactured in a limited edition of 450, the complete bikes sold for $18,000.
Yet Santiago Morales, the company’s engineering manager for testing, seems unruffled by this bike’s failure. He inspects the breakage, logs the number of cycles and the location and size of the cracks, then calmly unbolts the frame and hangs it on the wall. Morales is a naturally deliberate man. His studied indifference might be because he breaks frames every day, and there is no novelty to it anymore. But in this case, Morales acts unsurprised because he is unsurprised. He expected the frame to fail at some point; the only questions were where, when, and by how much. That’s because the McLaren on the bench isn’t a McLaren at all. It’s not even a Specialized.
Greg Tombragel just wanted a good race bike. Born and raised in the Cincinnati area, the 43-year-old IT leader with General Electric’s aviation division started riding in 2007 on an inexpensive aluminum Bottecchia, “when I was about 50 pounds heavier than I am now,” he says.
Though Tombragel picked up riding relatively late in life, he made up in ability what he lacked in experience. As his fitness and physique transformed, friends suggested he try racing. And as he upgraded (he is now a category 2), so did his bikes. In 2010, he bought a BMC Racemaster SLX01, a light, stiff model made from carbon and aluminum. When the seatpost seized in the frame four years later, and the warranty claim dragged out, he began looking for a replacement bike. He tried to buy a used Specialized Venge on eBay, “but you can’t touch a one- to two-year-old frameset for less than $1,500,” he says. “I put in a few bids and lost.” Although he has a good job at GE, he didn’t want to spend the $5,500 it would have cost to purchase a new, race-ready Venge.
Ironically, it was his search for legitimate items that led him to a murky deal. “Because I’d been looking on eBay and Google, I got served up an ad in Gmail from DHgate. Sure enough, you have a frame that looks dead-on like it’s a Venge,” he recalls. “You could tell it was Chinese-direct. But I’d bought things from overseas on eBay, so I was comfortable with it.” The bike was openly advertised as a Specialized. The cost: $500, including shipping.
When the frame arrived, he took it to a shop to have the parts switched from his old BMC. But from the start, there were issues. Over the next few months, he began to notice that the dropouts weren’t totally aligned. To spin freely, the rear wheel had to be clamped slightly askew. Other oddities: Standard water bottle cage bolts didn’t fit in the frame. And after a few weeks, the screw-in cable-stop adaptor for the internally routed cables began to rust. These weren’t the only signs something was amiss. Not long after getting the bike, he had an unsettling experience on a descent. “In the chainstays and fork, there was a kind of squishy feel,” he recalls. “I just didn’t have any confidence in high-speed turns.” Similar sensations followed on other rides. Additionally, he felt unstable on the bike when sprinting. A return trip to the shop to try to fix some of the issues confirmed what Tombragel had begun to suspect. The shop owner showed a visiting Specialized rep this mysterious Venge with misaligned dropouts. After a few moments, the rep dropped the bad news: “That’s a fake.”
For the counterfeit McLaren to make it to Morales’s test lab at Specialized HQ, it detoured first to a cluster of nondescript Salt Lake City warehouses in the industrial district southwest of the airport.
Inside one of these low-slung buildings, nestled within a warren of cubicles, is the nerve center of Specialized’s anti-counterfeit operations. One cube overflows with fake Evade and Prevail helmets, Body Geometry saddles, Aerofly handlebars, and bicycle frames. A second fake McLaren Venge leans against a wall. (A third rests in another pile of counterfeit frames in a warehouse.) In the cube next to this collection sits Andrew Love, the company’s lead on brand security and investigations.
A former elite speed skater, Love took a customer-service job at Specialized in 2007. By that fall, he was spending 20 percent of his time chasing counterfeits, mostly jerseys and other soft goods. Then, in 2008, a fake Tarmac came in, and by the end of 2009, “the counterfeit attacks had become relentless,” Love says.
“Our CFO at the time, John Rangel, came to the office one day and I asked him for a meeting,” recalls the 44-year-old Love. He pulled Rangel into a conference room where he’d laid out a dozen or so counterfeit jerseys along with the fake Tarmac and said, “Do you have any idea of the tsunami that’s coming?”
“He basically told me to write my job description,” says Love, who is now the foremost counterfeit sleuth in the bike industry and leads a team of 10, three of them full-time investigators, the largest in-house anti-counterfeit unit in the cycling world. Speak with anyone in the industry about counterfeit and, without fail, they’ll say: “You should really talk to Andrew Love.”
Love was prescient about the coming wave. It hadn’t yet hit cycling full force, but, before long, online marketplaces from the familiar (eBay, Amazon) to the new and exotic (Alibaba) were flooded with fake goods.
Because it’s a criminal enterprise, precise statistics on counterfeiting of specific products are difficult to come by. But according to the US Department of Homeland Security, its seizures of counterfeit goods have increased by more than 300 percent in the past decade, topping $1.2 billion in value last year.
The most affected, and most visible, items tend to be luxury goods—the imitation Hermès Birkin bag or the street-corner Rolex. In the bike industry, prestigious brands like Pinarello, Specialized, and Zipp—which have distinctive, easy-to-recognize products—seem to get hit the hardest.
And high-end items—like carbon fiber bicycle frames—are most frequently mimicked. Because carbon fiber is layered into molds to make the finished product, it’s an almost ideal material to use in counterfeiting. It’s easier to work with than metal is, and the final frame or wheel or handlebar can look identical to the real thing even if what’s underneath bears no resemblance to it. If you can make a mold, you can make a fake. Helmets, too, are often counterfeited because they are manufactured in molds.
A fake purse or timepiece is one thing; it breaks, you get a new one. But the disturbing reality that sets counterfeit bikes, parts, and accessories apart is that, when you need them most, they may fail you catastrophically. And if they do, there is no one credible standing behind them.
Counterfeiters generally are made up of two broad groups: factories that make illicit goods, and vendors who sell them. Multiple industry sources told us that sometimes they are one and the same, but more often they’re separate entities. The factories churn out the fakes, and the sellers buy them to resell—often to customers in Europe and North America.
The practice is mostly beyond the reach of Western law enforcement: According to the Department of Homeland Security, almost 90 percent of counterfeit goods seized in the US last year came from China and Hong Kong. “You are never going to seize your way out of the problem,” says Bruce Foucart, director of the government’s National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, which manages anti-counterfeit efforts across 19 federal agencies.
Complicating the issue is how counterfeit goods are sold. “It’s unfortunate, but the Internet has made the problem worse,” says Foucart. It gives crooks an opportunity to proliferate that didn’t exist when counterfeit goods had to be sold in person, he says.
Some of the bolder counterfeiters sell direct on their own sites, like Greatkeen Bike and OEM-Carbon (domains that Specialized seized earlier this year). And fakes are still sold regularly on Amazon, eBay, and sometimes Craigslist. But Love estimates that 95 percent of the counterfeits he sees are on Asian marketplace sites like DHgate, where Tombragel bought his Venge, or Ali Express and Taobao (both part of Alibaba), which promise Western consumers direct access to Asian manufacturers, without the middleman.
“Alibaba alone is an umbrella with six or seven different platforms,” says Michele Provera, vice president of brand protection for Convey SRL, an Italian internet brand protection firm that works with more than 40 companies in the cycling industry. “[It has] extremely evolved e-commerce and hundreds of millions of users a month.”
Since Convey started working with Pinarello in 2013, the firm has taken down 45,000 listings for counterfeit goods (a listing can include multiple items). Wei Tang, who works on Love’s team as Specialized’s dedicated liaison to Alibaba Group sites, says that in the first seven months of 2015, he got more than $5 million in fake inventory delisted just from Alibaba websites. Specialized knocks down about $15 million a year total in counterfeit sales, across more than 80 platforms. In a written response to our request for comment, Candice Huang, a spokesperson for the Alibaba Group, said that it has more than 2,000 staff devoted to fighting counterfeit on its sites, a problem that founder Jack Ma has called “a cancer.”
And the cancer is proliferating, thanks to new dedicated shopping apps that are beyond the reach of most anti-counterfeit tools. Love predicts that the next frontier will be peer-to-peer sales on social media—Facebook, he says, recently rolled out a mobile payments processor. With sales hidden inside a dedicated app, and financial transactions routed out of plain sight, the entire counterfeit network could drop from view, but be as close as a couple of swipes on a smartphone screen.
Anatomy of a Fake Helmet
• The foam is less dense and is thinner—by as much as 4.5mm—than on the real Evade.
• The fake does not carry the stickers that indicate it meets US government safety standards.
• The plastic fit retention device is made of cheap, stiff plastic, with a bulky ratchet dial, compared with the one on the real helmet.
• On the scale, the fake is 45g lighter than the real Evade.
• The fake lacks a roll cage, an internal skeleton (the larger dots in the cross section of the real Evade, above) that holds the helmet intact in a crash.
• In a crash, the fake would have offered almost no protection.
Watch a video of us cutting a counterfeit Evade alongside a real one.
Love moves in slow motion in his Salt Lake City cubicle. The pain medication he’s been using to counteract the lingering effects of a crash a few days prior is taking a toll. Despite operating at what he calls 70-percent capacity, he’s irrepressibly bubbly as he scrolls through fake gear listings on direct-from-Asia sites.
In the fight against fakes, Love and outfits like Convey use a variety of tools. They work with law enforcement to seize shipments, they pursue financial trails and get counterfeit sellers’ PayPal and credit card accounts shut down and funds seized, and they have high-level direct contacts with the marketplace sites themselves.
But the benchmark tool is a form known as a takedown notice. Almost every major online marketplace has a version of it. (Amazon is the most cumbersome to work with, says Love; eBay and Alibaba are more responsive.) The underlying idea is simple: A brand can register its trademarks and other intellectual property rights with the site, then use the form to submit a takedown request. Since the intellectual property rights are already on file, the sites rely on an affirmation by the rights holder that it believes, in good faith, that the advertised item is a counterfeit.
Naturally, counterfeiters find ways to outsmart the system. Tools like these rely heavily on automated web-crawling software that uses a keyword search to flag listings as questionable. So the counterfeiters simply will eliminate trade names in listing titles and product copy. The software also has image recognition capabilities, particularly for logos. So the craftiest sellers will hide identifying details deep in a post, if they show them at all.
“Ali Express is just the heart of darkness,” Love says with a chuckle, offering a running commentary on questionable listings flagged for review. “Okay, here’s a good one. These are fake Venges, but the listing doesn’t have anything about Specialized until you get way down into it.” In fact, the listing reads: “2015 New painting road bicycle carbon frame.” The image is a plain black frame, but clearly a Venge copy.
Love pauses. “Yeah, here, in the photos, as you click through, here’s an S-Works version.” He clicks the seller store link, which reveals listings for frames from other brands, plus bicycle handlebars, wheels, even saddles. Another brief pause, then: “I’m gonna hammer this guy.” He opens the takedown notice.
If it sounds unwieldy, it is. Even though Love can batch the requests, he has to submit each one manually, and that means examining each listing or seller to ensure it’s a fake. One effort largely beyond the reach of brand-security efforts: getting to the factories themselves. In very rare cases, the counterfeits come from a supplier that produces more items than ordered and sells the rest on its own, called “third shift” counterfeiting. The products are accurate, but unauthorized. Most of the time, the molds are reverse-engineered from legit samples or even just photos. And the opaque, crawling nature of the Chinese justice system is a significant obstacle in chasing down these rogue factories. You could spend years on a case and end up with nothing to show for it, says Convey’s Michele Provera. Foucart, of the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center, picks his words carefully, since the agencies he deals with have to work with Chinese counterparts. “Chinese law enforcement has been cooperative in the last couple of years,” he says, citing a case in which a maker of fake airbag parts was shut down. “I’m optimistic things will continue to improve.” But he freely allows that counterfeits from China are his agency’s biggest challenge.
Security specialists are exhausted by the Sisyphean nature of the fight, atomized across dozens of marketplace sites and dedicated apps aimed at retail customers buying individual items. “This isn’t a shipping container of fake helmets coming in through customs,” says Martin Nguyen, general counsel for Action Sports at BRG Sports Inc., parent company to Bell and Giro. “This stuff trickles across the border in ones and twos. It’s almost impossible to interdict.”
How to Avoid a Fake
• Check out the seller: So many counterfeit items originate in China that a seller based there should be an automatic red flag. Legitimate dealers have dedicated websites outside of their marketplace identities, which should be listed in their profiles. Use this to verify their dealer status with the manufacturer.
• Read listings carefully: When it says “email for color/graphics,” it likely means the seller has omitted those details to evade brand security. Also, positive reviews can be misleading; they might be notes from buyers simply saying the item arrived on time. Likewise, a seller’s membership in a “preferred/verified seller” program may have little to do with the legitimacy of the merchandise.
• Research brand policies: "If you see frames that look like Venges alongside others that look like Dogma F8s and Look 695s—that are all unlabeled—find out if the seller is an official dealer (most brands list them on their websites). Some, like Cervélo, don’t allow online sales. Others do, but only via specific channels, say, on a bike shop’s own site, and not on third-party platforms like Amazon.
• Use common sense: A brand-new Look 695 frameset for $500? Don’t be so taken by the deal that you suspend rational thinking.
All of which points out an unpleasant truth about the McLaren Venge that Santiago Morales broke at the Specialized test lab: It wasn’t seized from an online seller; it wasn’t intercepted on a loading dock, or found as evidence in a warehouse raid. It was handed over voluntarily by the man who bought it: Greg Tombragel.
Tombragel may not have looked closely at what he was buying or from where, but he wasn’t hunting a fake. Mostly, he was just looking for a good deal. Though he briefly wondered if the bike was counterfeit, he didn’t push the question. “DHgate looks like eBay, and you can use your credit card,” he says. “I felt like if it had the logo, it had to be real.” The seller allowed buyers to pick paint. He went with a McLaren scheme, unaware that the real version was a limited edition that sold out immediately.
Love has a theory for what drives customers to buy fakes. He draws a line graph with price rising on the Y-axis and likelihood of a counterfeit increasing on the X-axis. He calls it the LOP Theorem; the letters stand for “legal,” “opportunistic,” and “piracy.” He points to the upperleft corner: “Here is a Venge frameset for $3,600 that’s clearly legit.” Then to the lower right: “At $50, it’s obviously a fake and you have a piracy-inclined buyer. But there’s a gray area where people are opportunistic,” he continues, drawing a large circle in the middle. “They may wonder, ‘Is this a scam, or am I just getting a good deal?’”
Tombragel’s justification and Love’s theory make sense to Dr. Dan Ariely, a professor of psychology and behavioral economics at Duke University who has studied the psychology of counterfeit buyers. We convince ourselves that it’s okay to buy a fake, he says. “There is a rationalization where you say, ‘These companies make too much money, and this frame is made of the same material as the real ones,’” Ariely says.
These rationalizations are generally rooted in buyers’ perceptions—beliefs that are only sometimes true. For instance, many consumers believe that because almost all modern cycling gear is made in Asia, it all comes out of the same factories. “About 15 years ago, a lot of the European and American brands began to outsource their production,” says John Neugent, a former bike industry executive who helped brands like Velomax Wheel Systems (now Easton Sports) do exactly that. But there’s a broad spectrum of factories in Asia making cycling gear, from those that make products exactly to the specification of the brand, to so-called “open mold” suppliers, to full-on counterfeiters.
The circumstances here are nuanced. By outsourcing to Asia, Neugent explains, the bike industry bears some responsibility for the problem. “In Asia, even if you have intellectual property agreements with the factory, when you show people how to build your products, you teach them trade secrets,” he says, adding that trade secrets are not subject to patent. “If the factory manager leaves and starts his own company, he has that knowledge. It’s just the way the business works.”
Scott Nielson, vice president of engineering at Enve Composites in Ogden, Utah, adds: “Once you take a product to Asia, you have about two years before someone is doing something similar.” Sometimes the difference between open mold and infringing is thin: a few millimeters in frame geometry, perhaps. Mike Clarry, a lawyer for Toronto-based Cervélo, says that the company regularly sees unlabeled frames online that look exactly like a P5 time trial bike. “From a legal point of view, it does infringe, because we have a patent that covers the cutout on the rear wheel,” he says. But it’s difficult to knock down because the seller avoids using trademarks like the name “Cervélo” or the accented “é” logo.
Helmets sold in the US must undergo Consumer Product Safety Commission testing and carry a sticker certifying that they passed (or a Snell B90A sticker, essentially the same standard). Many fakes purchased in the US have incorrect markings, such as a CE (European standard). The CPSC test has multiple components: One measures the integrity of the straps; several others measure impact.
Giro Aeon Helmet
- Dynamic Retention Test: The helmet is strapped and adjusted to a level head form. A 4kg weight is secured to the chinstrap and dropped .6m. The straps can’t stretch more than 30mm. The fake exceeded 30mm. = FAIL
- Impact Test: A helmet is strapped to a 5kg head form and dropped from various heights onto flat, hemispherical, and “curbstone” metal anvils. Peak instantaneous acceleration on impact may not exceed 300 Gs. The fake's peak acceleration of 1,052 Gs onto a curbstone anvil is roughly similar to your bare head hitting a surface in a bicycle crash. = FAIL
CPSC helmet standards don’t have a penetration test, but the fake Aeon fractured into multiple pieces on impact. Because the helmet didn’t retain its shape, the anvil broke through the shell and hit the head form directly.
Enve Riser Handlebar Test: Engineers clamp 16-pound weights to the handlebar ends and drop it from increasing heights, starting at six inches and increasing by two inches each time. To pass, the bar must reach drops of 24 inches before breaking. The test replicates drop-offs and jumps, but because the test rig is static, the forces are higher than would correspond to drops from the same heights on a real bike.
- Real: went 42 inches before breaking.
- Fake: went only 10 inches before entire right side of handlebar broke completely off at riser bend.
Neugent himself imports aluminum and carbon wheel components from Asia under his private label, consumer-direct Neugent Cycling brand, a classic (and legitimate) cut-out-the-middleman operation. He doesn’t engineer his own rim shapes, for example. Instead, he imports open mold products from Asia that aren’t covered by a company’s intellectual property rights. With minimal overhead and no dealer network, Neugent can sell for less than Enve or Zipp, but he still has to support the integrity of his product line, so he relies on years of industry experience to know which factories produce quality products.
Another consumer perception: Skyrocketing retail prices mean companies are getting rich even as they take advantage of cheap manufacturing in Asia. That’s only partly true. In fact, the cost of manufacturing in China has risen over the past decade to the point that $1 of manufacturing power in the US equals 96 cents in China. As well, direct comparisons of products show that retail prices have in some cases remained static or even declined over the past decade.
What is true: At the high end, prices have exploded. A Cannondale SuperSix EVO Hi-Mod Team is more than $9,000. Trek’s new aero Madone series starts at $6,000 and tops $12,000 in standard versions, as does Specialized’s new Venge ViAS. Enve’s SES 3.4 wheelsets start at $2,375. It’s no surprise, then, that consumers may suspect they’re paying inflated prices when they’re inundated with listings on marketplaces that promise the same products, but at wholesale prices that cut out the middleman. “Customers are bombarded by $400 wheels,” says John Balmer, aftermarket category manager at SRAM. “Their trust is shaken. They wonder, ‘How can Zipp wheels really cost almost $3,000? These seem like the same thing.’”
All the buyers of fakes we spoke with have stable jobs. Their decisions to purchase counterfeits were not driven by need—instead, they couldn’t resist a bargain. But one thing they say never crossed their minds: Could there be a dangerous side to such an irresistible deal?
Ken Avchen is no rookie. The 58-year-old Reseda, California, resident is a three-time masters state track champion who ran the Encino Velodrome for more than 10 years. He’s been riding and racing for decades. But this year, he started to do more of what he calls “fondo-type rides” and bought a Cannondale Synapse.
“I saw this handlebar on eBay that was carbon fiber,” he says. “I wasn’t interested in super-light weight. I liked the bend and wanted the comfort factor of carbon.”
The $70 price tag couldn’t be beat, especially compared with $250 or more for similar bars from brands like Zipp or Enve or 3T. “They had a name brand—Hylix,” he recalls. That Avchen had never heard of it didn’t bother him. “I looked at the feedback. They had a good score.” Just weeks after receiving the handlebar, he found himself sprawled across the pavement on Santa Susana Pass. Around him, a couple of cars had stopped. “I crawled to the side of the road, then looked at the bike,” he says. A few inches out from the stem clamp, the right side of the handlebar was snapped clean off.
Avchen lost consciousness in the crash and doesn’t remember the moments before, but he has since pieced together what happened. He was descending on a straight, smooth section of road. “There’s not a scratch on the bar or levers, so I didn’t lose control and then crash,” he says. “The bar broke and caused the crash.” Based on his bike computer, Avchen estimates he was going about 30 to 35 mph. He broke his neck in two places, fractured an orbital bone and a cheekbone, suffered a concussion, and his body “was turned to hamburger.”
Prior to the crash, Avchen never considered that buying direct from Asia could be dangerous. After all, Asia is home to some of the most sophisticated carbon fiber manufacturing in the bike industry. “I didn’t think about injuries,” he says. “I thought that if anything happens, they’ll get me a new handlebar or refund the money. It’s eBay.” Avchen says he understands a key difference now: When companies like 3T manufacture in Asia, they enforce quality control on their suppliers that solo buyers like him simply can’t replicate. Says Neugent: “People ask me all the time about the quality of direct-from-Asia products. I tell them I have no idea; it’s up to the brands themselves to police it.”
Several other buyers we spoke with had almost identical attitudes: Essentially, the purchase was a low-risk experiment. If the handlebar or frame broke, at worst they had lost a little money and they would have to buy a new one. None expressed concern over whether, if the product failed, it might do so in such a way as to harm them. Some fakes buyers even proudly advertise their purchases. They post unboxing or review videos on YouTube, weigh in on forum threads encouraging curious would-be buyers to purchase fakes, or create blogs extolling cheap Chinese carbon. There’s even a “CC Chinarello” club on Strava with 23 members.
After Tombragel learned his bike was in fact a fake, one of his friends asked if he was afraid it would blow up on him. “I said no, I wasn’t worried that it would break.”
Had Avchen dug a bit deeper on Hylix, he might have discovered cause for concern. The parts are sold only on eBay, for starters; there is no sign of a broader brand presence. The handlebars often liberally borrow trademarked model names (Aeronova, Ergonova) from 3T, and the shapes look almost identical. Hylix handlebars may not strictly be counterfeit because they aren’t advertised as 3T, but at the minimum they’re knockoffs (which differs from a fake because it doesn’t carry the brand name itself). On cycling forums, some buyers report catastrophic failures. One rider purchased a rigid carbon mountain bike fork only to have the steerer tube snap in half on the first ride.
Meanwhile Avchen is still recovering from his injuries, and even with insurance, he faces thousands of dollars in hospital bills and time away from work. If the handlebar that failed without warning had been a 3T or a Bontrager or any other legitimate brand, the company would have been legally liable. But Avchen doesn’t have that option. “My cousin is a lawyer. He was like, ‘Let’s sue them,’” Avchen says. “I told him, ‘Who? How? There’s nobody to sue. These guys are in China.’”
Greg Tombragel estimates he rode a little over 1,000 miles on his McLaren, including some races. But once the bike was confirmed a fake, the experience changed. He still wasn’t concerned about a failure, but the cumulative weight of the bike’s issues—the rear wheel slipping in the dropouts under power, the strangely loose feeling in hard corners—got into his head. “When you’re racing, and you don’t have confidence, forget it,” he says.
It was also a matter of pride. The guy riding the sweet-looking McLaren Venge wasn’t on a McLaren at all, not even a Venge. “The guys I ride with all ride real Tarmacs and Venges, and once I was told [it was fake], I couldn’t let them think it was real,” he says.
When the Specialized sales rep pegged Tombragel’s bike as a counterfeit, he handed Tombragel a card with some contact info on it, someone who might be able to help him, maybe even get his money back: Andrew Love.
Normally, Tombragel’s fake McLaren might have joined Love’s growing collection of fakes. But at Bicycling’s request, Love sent it to Morales in Morgan Hill for testing. Morales’ job might be one of the most fun in the bike industry; he gets to break stuff every day. But it’s also one of the most sobering, because he sees the terrifying variability and randomness of counterfeits. That’s because every carbon fiber product is a quality-control batch of one, and the finished outside shape tells you almost zero about what’s really inside.
A frame can have hundreds of individual sheets of carbon fiber (called plies) of varying size and shape, which are placed in the mold in specific places in a rigidly defined order (called the layup). To make matters more complex, carbon fiber is unidirectional; its stiffness and strength characteristics apply only along one axis. To preserve those characteristics, a manufacturer must get the number, shape, and size of the plies, and their fiber orientation in the correct order, every time. That’s to say nothing of the actual grades of carbon fiber used, or the resin that holds the fibers in place and adds toughness and durability, or the sophistication and reliability of the manufacturer’s own production process.
To get all of those details right, legitimate manufacturers employ engineering, R&D, and quality-control teams. To protect themselves and the consumer, they obtain liability insurance and offer warranty support and customer service. For certain products, they get regulatory approval that the item has passed testing standards.
Counterfeiters, on the other hand, skip those steps, while cutting corners on materials and manufacturing. On one of the fake Venges in Love’s collection, the bottom bracket shell is separating from the frame. Another has large voids in the head tube. (A void is where the layers aren’t tightly compacted. Over time the tube cracks.)
Enve’s Scott Nielson shares a particularly vivid example of how sloppy counterfeiters are. The company recently tested a fake riser handlebar. “It was 109 grams,” he recalls. “For comparison, ours is 189. It snapped under my foot like a stick.”
“People at a company spend a lot of time on what they produce,” says Ariely, the Duke psychology professor. Customers see only the final product, and don’t necessarily feel the need to pay for that development, he explains. “But without R&D you aren’t going to get better products.”
What outcome Tombragel might have experienced on his McLaren Venge is unknowable. Maybe he’d be like the CC Chinarello crew, happily riding his fake with friends. The testing, however, suggests a far more frightening scenario.
Despite being heavier than a real Venge, Tombragel’s frame sustained significant damage. In the pedal-fatigue test, both chainstays cracked at the bond with the bottom bracket; one almost entirely through. The frame was so deficient in torsional and bottom-bracket stiffness (21 percent less than an S-Works Venge in both cases) that a spreading crack developed in the down tube near one of the entry points for a derailleur cable, a location that surprised Morales—failure from pedal forces is unusual so high up on a stiff racing frame. And just 20 percent into the industry-standard vertical-fatigue test, meant to simulate potholes and bumps, a crack formed in the seat tube.
When carbon fiber starts to fail, it cracks imperceptibly at first, but at some point, forces overwhelm the material and it fails suddenly. Over time, Tombragel might have noticed more of that soft feeling he’d sensed when sprinting. But as the cracks spread, the situation could have been catastrophic, says Morales. The extra weight didn’t translate to greater stiffness or durability. “This is not an engineered product in any way,” he says. “It’s essentially a mediocre canvas painted to look the same.”
Regardless, Tombragel’s direct-from-Asia experiment is over. He figures, between the cost of the frame and swapping parts from (and back to) the BMC, he’s probably out what it would have cost to buy a secondhand, legitimate Venge on eBay. He’ll get another bike, and he’d like it to be a Specialized. “I respect the brand,” he says. “The Venge and Tarmac, to me, are the best-reviewed race bikes out there. I mean, that’s what I wanted before going down this crazy path.”
But his McLaren is gone. It’s not illegal in the US to own a counterfeit item, like it can be elsewhere. So why did he voluntarily surrender it to Love? Tombragel hoped Love could help him get his money back. But that wasn’t the only reason. After what he’d learned, he thought that it belonged with Specialized.
"It didn’t feel right to even keep it."
Joe Lindsey is a longtime freelance journalist who writes about sports and outdoors, health and fitness, and science and tech, especially where the three elements in that Venn diagram overlap.
