LAVA spoke with one of Cervelo's newest hires in lead designer Briggs to find out what went into making a custom ride that delivered on several important messages for the reigning Hawaii Ironman World Champ.
LAVA: At what point did Cervelo decide to depart from a history of stock bikes for pro triathletes? Certainly winning an Ironman world title is a motivator...
Briggs: When Freddy won Kona, there was a seed planted there. But it was Leslie (Loughlin, Cervelo marketing manager) who was the driving force. I didn't start with Cervelo until January, so I think the ball had been rolling before my arrival. But once I was established there, she brought it up with me. At that point, we started creating concepts, and reached out to Frederick to get his input.
LAVA: What did that communication with Frederick entail?
Briggs: We went back and forth. I asked a series of questions and gauged his response. There were sources of inspiration for him, the features he finds within his training and racing that push him forward, and it was my job to distill that into a graphics package. There were six or seven ideas we had.
LAVA: What was the timeline for this project?
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Briggs: Start to finish, having the bike in our hands, was just shy of two months. It was easy going back and forth. Frederick had lots of good ideas.
LAVA: Certainly, there's a storyline in any custom bike, a motivation. What's the process here?
Briggs: There are three ideas we wanted to get across on this bike: family, technology and speed. Family is first for Frederick, and technology is important, but speed, that's the whole point of this.
He has both of his kids' names and his wife Sofie's name on bike. That's an inspiration he can draw from in a race.
From that, he wanted technology to be prevalent. So we looked at it: what are tools for his job? The bike, use of computers both in the race and in processing training data, so technology is a key to what he does. And of course, Cervelo is about high end technology. We wanted to visualize that technology and make that a graphic element. The idea of pixels really was prevalent; it's the most basic element on a computer screen, and the P5 started on a computer screen. So the idea of pixels became a driving force.