The end of the season means taking a break from all the races and competitions but in no way does it mean forgetting speed. Thanks to the off-season period we found the time to test our Argon Road Track bike equipped with GATES Carbon Drive System. As Joris Bigoni, our World Cup downhill racer, was using the bike to train in the velodrome during the winter we took the opportunity to follow him with our camera team on his first test ride. We wanted to see how the GATES Carbon Drive works at high speed, high velocity and high load. Where else would you get such an opportunity to test on a high speed track with a fixed gear bike and no brakes? Evident from the first few laps was how silently the whole system ( 60T to 20T gear ratio) worked during acceleration and max velocity. The wooden track in the velodrome worked like the corpus of an instrument and the most noticeable noise was the tire noise and the chain friction noise of the other track bikes whilst pedaling. If you draw a relation between noise and friction, you may get an idea how efficient a silent Carbon Drive system works. Our next test session was on a cycling road around Lake Annecy. This open air course is exclusively made for cyclists which, once gain, allowed us to ride full throttle. The video documentary of the training and test sessions is available on our website or under: http://www.youtube.com/user/WhyexProductions#p/ a/u/2/_hNgCEfbT3Y The velodrome track training continued throughout the winter until the end of march 2010. Under indoor conditions the GATES Carbon Drive system seems to last forever. There was hardly any sign of abrasion either on the belt or on the pulleys after 5 months and around 6000 km of training. FIXED GEAR AND NO BRAKES