merckx motorola team bike

The old tanks!  We had the Serotta-built Huffys, and then Rossins, and then we got Merckx. The Merckx bikes were really stable rides compared to the Rossins and Serottas, which were built with pretty light tubing. Merckx, he just built heavy bikes, the heaviest bikes. Great descending, very stable. He built bikes that were very durable, all built in his Belgian factory.

The first year we got these bikes as a sponsorship we got to ride with Eddy, and I remember we rode down in the southern part of Switzerland, in Grenoble. He would come and visit the team every once in a while, so we got him a kit and he got on the bike and I sat behind him and was just amazed at how smooth his pedaling style was. It was just unbelievable. He stopped like five times to adjust his seat up or down a millimeter. He had the most beautiful pedal stroke I’ve ever seen. An incredible pedaler and tactician, he understood the sport so well. Huge lungs.

Merckx did custom bikes, but we rode stock geometry. Some guys wanted a little bit more angle in their seat tube, some guys a little less, but we didn’t understand the whole sense of fitting principles then. We didn’t get seat tube angle, didn’t matter, it was just where your seat was.

During this era the LeMond and Hinault thing was going on where you slid your seat as far back and as high as you could get. We all tried it and I hurt my back doing that – not the right thing! You tried to get as low as you could on the front but that didn’t work either. It was just a lot of feel, the way bikes were set up, there was no plumb bob and all of that, so you could have a custom bike but it didn’t necessarily mean you knew what you were doing. That was the year Andy Pruitt started coming out and when I hurt my back he’s the guy who helped me recover.

This bike and bike #4 are two years apart. In 1992 they got rid of the chrome on the fork because it made them pretty heavy. The frame is MX Tubing and you can see where it is big and ovalized, which gave a really stiff bottom bracket, but it made the bike heavy as pig iron. But they were very durable and stable.