My last bike was a Raleigh RC9000. Aluminium bike with the carbon rear stay and front fork. As I am a design engineer I have a pretty good under standing of structural strengths, dynamics of motion, etc. My take is that Raleigh is fine for entry level bicycles and your average cyclist. However if you are looking at a top of the range bike in order to race aggressively and allow your bike to last you many years like a properly designed bike should, then stay away from buying Raleigh's and other brands that are not well known or tested. I am currently riding a Cervelo Soloist Carbon and if you compare the flex at the BB between the 2 bikes you will be amazed to see just how poor the stiffness of the RC9000 can be. The new RC6000 carbon frames had major problems with the frame as they were all cracking in the same place, on the left hand chainstay. I have seen this myself in a friends bike. The problem with carbon is that it is very, very stiff and strong in one direction, but 90 degrees to this it is as pap as a piece of spagetti and only has the strenght of the resin which hold it together (not much at all). Therefore the only way, to correctly engineer a carbon bike in order to bring out the full potential of carbon and make it safe is to use FEA (Finite Element Analysis) computer software to analyse the stiffness, fatigue limit and strength of the frame under normal riding conditions. Unfortunately very few carbon bike manufacturers do this, I strongly doubt Raleigh did this and if they did, then they came up short in their calculations. 4 years ago there was a post advertised for a design engineer at the company that distribute, build and sell Raleighs in South Africa. At that stage I had 2 years experience in the design field. I have a B.Eng degree from Stellenbosch University, I was told I was over-qualified for the job. I later learned they hired someone with no formal engineering training to spec there bikes and do the designs they were responsible for. I did some more research into the way they performed there designs and let's just say that I was shocked. So I stick to what I say before, Raleigh's are finie for the masses, but high end bikes that you are going to race at 100km/h with balls to the wall aggression, rather spend a bit more money and get something that is correctly engineered and that you can find properly documented engineering data on (e.g. check out the engineering notes on the cervelo website - these guys know what they are doing). At the end of the day, whatever bike you buy you need to ask yourself just one question: When I am hurtling down a mountain pass at 90km/h and all that is between me and the bone-crushing tar is about 7kg of man-made-designed material, do I trust the people that designed it, built it, tested it, marketed it and sold it or did I blindly try and squeeze as much out of the budget I had in order to get something that could end my cycling career and life right here, right now?
