Cooper Bikes T100, T200 real / pretend fixies
Cooper - as in Mini - have jumped confidently onto the fashion fixie bandwagon with a range of four steel fixed wheel / singlespeed 'street bikes' to suit various one-gear-only tastes. The bikes are smart, English, and have won a few awards from the cycling press.
The Cooper T100 Sebring and the Cooper T100 Monza are priced from £595. Both are made of Reynolds 520 steel, and come in 52cm, 57cm and 61cm. The Cooper T200 Championship 50 is available from £849. It uses a Reynolds 531 tubeset. Top of the current range is the Cooper T200 Reims which starts at £895. Also 531, this one looks like a fixie but sneaks in a Sturmey Archer 5-speed hub. Nice thinking. Both the T200s are a bit more aggressive on the track bike geometry. My fixie is a 54cm, so were I to hanker after one I'd be presented with a dilemna... go big, or small? All the geometry specs are on the site to allow informed decisions. The T100 Sebring is the weightiest, with a listed weight of 9.95kg (sounds much better than 10kg), and all the others come in at around 9.5kg. So not light... but not super-heavy either. My pal's Pompino, another off-the-shelf fixed / singlespeed 'street bike' seems to weigh a ton, and that's Reynolds 631. I'm assuming 631 is lighter than Reynolds tubesets of a lower denomination... The Cooper Bikes website is rather splendid, and was done by Worthing's Fresh Egg, who seem to be doing rather well for themselves these days. The whole Cooper Bikes thing looks pretty solid - I hope the bikes prove popular. But as my Step-da would say... "Where are the mudguards?" Apparently more bikes are on the way later in the year.
Posted by Andy Triggs
