Bay Area based Tom Ritchey started as one of the MTB bike-building pioneers, and over the last 15 years his company has segued into components for both road and MTB. His is what might rightly be called an empire, and Ritchey wheels, stems, seat posts and part after part are spec'd as original equipment by a large number of bike companies.
Now Ritchey has expanded into the tri market with a new clip-on bar, the Prologue TT ($99). Its design follows the tried-and-true theme of a higher-end part, well thought-out, probably thoroughly engineered product, and is priced to fit into anybody's budget.
This bar is quite light to the touch, the bends in the extension are ergonomically appealing, and it's nicely styled. Ritchey has achieved a bar that is extremely adjustable without having too many nuts and bolts, and junctions, and moving parts. It has borrowed heavily from Profile Design in achieving this. The armrest design is reminiscent of the F18 armrests. The bar's length adjustment is similar to Profile's CarbonX, and its armrest width adjustment owes something to Profile's AirStryke.
Unfortunately the Prologue TT bar has also borrowed a less appealing feature from some of Profile's earlier bars—a feature which Profile itself has since omitted from its line. One bolt through the center of the Prologue armrest affixes to a nut underneath the armrest bracket. There is a washer inbetween the armrest base and the bracket, and there is nothing keeping the armrest from swiveling on its base. This swivel can take place between the base and the washer, or between the washer and the bracket underneath it. All of us who've ridden bars thusly made have experienced the hardware loosening enough so that the armrest swivels. This is especially so when the user occasionally resorts to grasping the armrest and using it as a climbing or sit-up-and-rest position.
What fixes this is for Ritchey to serrate all these surfaces, or to dimple, or divot, or provide a keyway, or in some manner imprint or impress all these surfaces so as not to allow the armrest to swivel.
I also wouldn't mind if the armrest itself was a bit bigger. It's a Profile F18 in appearance, but is 10- or 15-percent smaller. I'm peculiar in that I like the armrests moved up my forearms a bit, because I hate it when my knees hit the backs of the armrests when I'm climbing out of the saddle. For my specific needs, then, an armrest with a lot of surface area is a good thing.
I've included the unflattering photos I took with my digital (the bar is really nice looking, but I've managed to show its most unsexy sides), showing how much length adjustment is in these bars. They're set up on my road bike, and they're adjusted short, like the "shorty" bar I write about so often—not unlike the Big Slam bars John Cobb sells. Of course you'd want to cut off, with a tubing cutter, the "exhaust pipes" behind the clamp.
Ritchey should note that for ITU-style racing, its bars can be shortened to a point very close to ITU-legal, that is, where the extensions do not protude past the brake levers. But it's right on the nub. Should a user decide to employ these bars in ITU-style draft legal races he should probably employ his tubing cutter up front as well, and take off a centimeter or two of the forwardmost protrusion of this bar.
This bar was previewed at Interbike last year, but never sold. Ritchey gave one (or several) of these to Michellie Jones, who's been racing on them throughout the season, and giving Ritchey feedback. She's been using them for both ITU and no-draft racing. She just hacked off quite a bit from the back, and a little from the front, of the extensions for her draft-legal bike. Now the bar is in production, and Ritchey has inventory stateside.
The Prologue breaks no new ground in aero bar design, but—assuming it fixes the swivel problem—it's got itself a very nice aero bar, perfect for the O.E. market and for the budget-minded athlete who's looking for bang for the buck. It's also a reasonably-priced shorty bar for the triathlete who wants to ride a traditional geometry, non-retrofitted road race bike in his tri racing.
