Anastopoulos: “Let’s be honest. Everybody was insecure before they rode the bike because they didn’t even know that XDS and X-LAB existed. I didn’t know either. There were like, ‘OK, we’ll get the new bike from China. What’s the quality of this thing?’
“But the bikes were a real pleasant surprise. We gave XDS some guidelines and things we wanted to change when they first presented the bike to us in June. When Peter and Alex [
ed – Kennaugh and Dowsett, team engineers] ran tests on the aerodynamics and frame of the finished bike, we saw it was faster and stiffer compared to last year’s bike.