Quintana Roo is firing on all its tri bike cylinders: good aerodynamics, great fit and handling, stylish and adjustable front end, ergonomics, easy to work on and travel with, and now a really well designed disc brake version of its PR6.
The virtue commending Quintana Roo's current line of tri bikes - the PR series - is its utility in the face of bikes getting more and more exotic and esoteric. QR rightly predicted or sensed that the market was growing weary of bikes that required their own private mechanics and shipping specialists.
So it made a bike it said required 2 sizes of Allen key and a fairly basic knowledge of bike service. And that fit and handled well. And that didn't break.
They wagered right, and the PR series has been a hit since its introduction. Here's the interesting thing: What QR didn't do, because of its mission stated above, was get out over its skis in rim brake design. This meant the switch to disc brakes was pretty straightforward.
Also, moving to disc brakes works in tandem - at least conceptually - with QR's Shift technology, which is an attempt to move the air from the drive side to the left side. The obvious feature you see in Shift tech is a big fat chain stay on the left side. QR has used this big chain stay to fair the rear caliper. This makes QR the second company to try to fair the caliper, the first being Parlee, which I wrote a bit about in our Interbike coverage.
QR has a few of its disc brake PR6 bikes out at the Kona expo. It has some for sale now, ready to ship, but not a lot. A couple of dozen. Wide available for those who don't snatch up these first few will be in early December.
These bikes will sell complete for between $9000-ish and $12,000-ish depending on Ultegra or Dura Ace Di2, and the wheels you choose. There are no downspec versions of this bike. Framesets, however, are the other option, at $4,500, of you want to roll your own.
A lot of you are going to say, "Nice! But outa my price range." QR follows the typical pattern of downstreaming its tech, and the PR3 and PR5 versions of this bike are probably a year off.
