Soup Nazi Solution: TriRig

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This was a toughie, because we calced his pad Y and X out to, as I recall, something like 613 and 520mm respectively due to a longish torso, a quite steep riding posture and an acceptable but slightly obtuse shoulder angle. The answer to this question would have been easy a few years ago: He's a perfect fit aboard a Cervelo P3 Classic geometry. He's also a good fit aboard a QR CD0.1 or Illicito. But QR is moving toward a more mid-range geometry.

It's the Soup Nazi answer for this guy: No bike for you!
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Indeed, almost all tri bike brands have coalesced around this middlin' geometry. Felt, QR, Orbea, Trek, Argon 18 (through most of the size run), Giant (through most of the size run), Cannondale, Cervelo and others have arrived at a similar place. Woe to the fellow, like this guy, who needs that abandoned long/low tri geometry.

If you can't get the lowness out of the frame, we'll just get it out of the aerobar. Instead of 60mm of pad height above the pursuit bar center, we'll go to a bar with 25mm or 30mm of pad height. This is exactly what I've done for my own bikes and I chronicled this in mathing my way from a classic P3 to a taller, narrower older Cannondale Slice back in 2010. This would be okay if there were more low-profile aerobar companies out there. Alas, these are going away as well.

This is the conundrum I was pondering for this fellow. And then I remembered the TriRig Alpha series bars! Here's what this means for a fit issue like this one: You now don't start with a bike; you start with the bars. Your aerobars are the driver of the new bike purchase. (I've had occasion to resort to this going back quite awhile, as when in 2008 I needed to road test 3T's Ventus bars and mathed my way to the perfect frame matching those bars to my fit coordinates.)

TriRig not only offers a comfortable, adjustable, slippery (to the wind) aerobar, it has a fit system to which I alluded above. It's right here and the images here are screenshots from that calculator. The way this works, you select the bike model and size. There are a pair of dialogue boxes on the TriRig calculator that automatically populate with that frame's stack and reach. Let's take a QR PR5, size 54cm as an example. If you do this right the boxes are populated with 540 and 425 for stack and reach respectively, which are very mainstream numbers (Cervelo size 56, Trek SC in size L, Felt IA in size 56, etc.).

You then look for your pad Y and X on the TriRig chart. What you find under a Pad Y of 615mm and X of 519mm are:
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