According to Standert’s founder and CEO Max von Senger, the Berlin brand’s new race bike, the Kreissäge RS, is “about showing what metal bikes can do, about being different in a sea of black plastic”. Since 2012 Standert has built not only a cult following in the capital but also a race team that competes internationally – and the all-new bike, which is made of custom Dedacciai scandium tubing with aero profiles optimised in CFD, is a unique mix of tradition and technology that's built for speed.
Aluminium had a brief heyday at the top of the frame material world in the mid to late 1990s before carbon took over and although the new Kreissäge RS is anything but retro, when Standert introduced the original Kreissäge in 2016 Maxe Faschina, Standert's head of product development, admits they were inspired by aluminium’s glory days: “When we started the company we were all about steel bikes because it was a rowdy thing to do at the time and there was this DIY aesthetic, but then we wanted to represent what we built in the local racing scene because a lot of us still raced, and the steel bike was a little too expensive to crash in crit races. So we were like, let’s build a nice alloy frame. But instead of just doing a standard 6061 frame, we thought about what it could mean to us. We remembered scandium was around when we were 10, 11 years old and glued to the television watching Jan Ullrich in our grandparents’ summer vacation homes, not playing outside but watching television. And we remembered that Pantani too won on a scandium frame with Dedacciai tubing in 1998. Somehow we found this Dedacciai catalogue and it still had scandium tubing in it. So we contacted them and they said yes, we have tubing but we don’t have anyone to weld it because it’s not as easy to work with.”
Dedacciai recommended a framebuilder in Italy, Standert had a prototype built and Faschina remembers his first ride on it: “We used to have a show called Berliner Fahrradschau and the night before the show I received the frame, built it up, went on a ride at four o'clock in the morning because the bike had to be at the exhibition. It was April and was about -3° but I loved the feeling of this alloy, it was special. Obviously in my imagination there was all this heritage that fed into it. We built the Kreissäge around that and it worked really well. We always wanted the classic tube shapes but we wanted a big head tube because we liked the mountain bike size, but that allowed us later when integration arrived to leave the frame unchanged on the outside and just integrate everything fairly quickly. We had a lot of running changes, updates through the years. We went from obviously rim brake to disc brake, we always had the T47 threaded bottom bracket, tried to increase tyre width with every edition, had UDH and in the meantime we established the team that we run and sponsor [Team Standert Brandenburg] so the frame was actually racing on the European circuit at UCI level. Then it was the classic story – they said, ‘We want a faster bike’.”
Aero aluminium race bikes are of course nothing new: most recently the Specialized Allez Sprint showed what could be done, there's the Cannodale CAAD13 and Cervélo arguably pioneered it with the Soloist back in 2002. Where does the Kreissäge RS fit in? “We worked on aerodynamics while trying to keep the traditional approach, tubes with welds, and with the same framebuilder in Italy,” says Faschina. “So that was a challenge because at certain points we went to the limits of what’s possible with frontal area, especially the head tube.” The new head tube is radically hourglass shaped, while the tubing of the main triangle is profiled. Aerodynamic drag was further reduced by making the triangles smaller and the whole frame more compact. “We have this rule that we always revisit internally – no dropped seatstays. But we compromised a little bit as we thought about how to work around it. And we added comfort with more exposed seatpost. It’s not as radical as the classic Giant TCR but it’s working in that direction. As we always tend to do something different, with all the aero bikes now adopting the straight top tube, we go in the other direction. It’s something fresh and new.”
As for the rest of the specification: “We improved the fork, it’s more bladed, there’s 35mm of tyre width, UDH hanger, T47 bottom bracket but we went for a wider shell and put the bearings on the inside to allow for better tyre clearance and to add more stiffness to the bottom bracket area and got rid of the chainstay bridge that we previously thought was necessary to achieve the stiffness. I always think of the complete bike, so on the components side, we partnered with Polymer Workshop for the top spec – again a request from the team. I think Polymer at the moment offer one of the best cockpits – performance and ergonomics wise they’re amazing, and they look good too. So there will be cockpit options [including Standert’s own Lucky Cat cockpit] but the bike is compatible with every aftermarket cockpit. We kept the traditional 27.2mm seatpost to give people options there. For wheelsets we went with DT Swiss again as they’re still the benchmark for aero performance and reliability and there’s also the option of Scope Artech if you want to go fully nuts on the aero train.” One thing that hasn’t changed is the geometry. “It’s a trusted geometry – we didn’t change it because we and the team love it,” says Faschina.
What has the response from the team been like so far? And what do they make of being the only ones on aluminium bikes? “It was very interesting because originally the juniors approached us and said, ‘You guys are really cool, some of us have good bikes and some don’t – would you sponsor us? It was cool to see 16 and 17 year olds really trying to build something, so we said let’s go ahead and sponsor them. Most of them had no touchpoint with aluminium. They started in 2016 or 2017 and went straight to carbon, some old carbon bike from their parents because racing meant carbon. So there wasn’t much response regarding the material but more about the geometry, which was very racy, uncompromised and they loved it. They had this same feeling that I had. People say ‘oh, aluminium is a harsh ride’ but at the same time you feel the road and it feels rowdy and fast.”
That team, LV Brandenburg, were overall 2023 junior team champions in the cycling Bundesliga, a season-long series of nationwide races in Germany. “So we decided the next year when they made it to the U23 level we should make a U23 team for them. From that team – Team Standert Brandenburg, launched in 2024 – there were bigger races, they needed a faster bike and that was the goal for the new RS. Really to commit to an alloy race bike. Right now the guys are still on the current model of the RS and they just raced Eschborn-Frankfurt. This is the next step.”
With aerodynamics being so crucial in modern bike racing, how much testing did Standert do with the new Kreissäge RS? “I know it’s important from a marketing point of view,” says Faschina, “but to be honest you have a bunch of 3D-printed samples, you put them in the wind tunnel and go with the fastest one, maybe tweak a little, then you have two prototypes and go for the fastest one. But at that point you’re never going to think ‘oh, that’s not as fast as we thought it was, let’s go back to the drawing board’. From the very beginning you push towards a product from the very first pencil drawing. It’s an illusion that gets sold to the consumer that there’s all this research and this is the best we can do. No, actually what you’ve been doing is you took a wild guess, or 10 wild guesses, and one of them is the fastest in these conditions. And if you realise it’s not as fast as you thought it was, you look for the yaw angle in which it is the fastest and then you base all your data in marketing on that particular yaw angle. ‘If the wind comes in at seven degrees etc…’ So we didn’t do that. We did some CFD on the models, to optimise the tube shapes. We did the custom tube shapes with Dedacciai, we found the best option and we did some track tests just to compare against our baseline but we don’t want to have any disputes about data. We know it, and it is definitely much faster, but we’re not playing that game” He continues: “The most important performance gain from a bike is the confidence and the feeling it gives you. If it feels fast, you ride fast. I’ve seen plenty of bikes that tested amazingly fast, but they don’t go fast and I don’t feel fast. So this is what I try to explain to our kids in the team. If you guys are having fun, are good friends and are willing to work together towards a common goal that’s the biggest gain and it’s not marginal, it’s big big watts. You have to own it. If you’re all in with the alloy bike, the team are proud to ride an alloy bike, then they don’t hold back. They made this choice and it’s cool to see.”
The new Kreissäge RS comes in sizes from 48cm to 60cm in 2cm increments, with the smaller sizes featuring slightly different angles optimised for smaller riders, and customers select their own crank length and bar width/stem length since all bikes will be custom builds via Standert’s online configurator. The frameset will be priced at €1,999 and as an example build, a Kreissäge RS with Shimano Ultegra, DT Swiss Arc 1400 wheels, Standert Lucky Cat Seatpost and Lucky Cat cockpit will cost €6,299. The top builds will be Shimano Dura-Ace and SRAM Red, with Ultegra the entry level and SRAM Force available from the summer.
Visit Standert’s website for more.
