FanPost

Paris-Roubaix: Mean Time Between Failures

An engineer once told me that bicycles are designed to withstand some enormous number of vibration cycles before failure, with each cycle being the equivalent of riding over a cobble.  Something like a half million or a million cycles.  The engineer then told me that the design spec amounted to about 25km of cobbles. 

Paris-Roubaix has 53km of cobblestones.

Not surprising, then, that the Queen of the Classics played host to the strangest mechanical ever---Hincapie's broken steerer tube.  And we can pretty much count on one contender being taken out by a mechanical Sunday.  So I've created a poll so that the Cafe can weigh in on what will happen this year, with parenthetical examples of memorable mechanicals from the past.