The Excalibur is Ridley's best-selling race frame for good reason -- many good reasons, in fact. Some of it is self-evident: At 1100g it's a light frame at an unmatched price with no sacrifice to stiffness or performance. Unlike the triangulated "Sharp Edge Design" you find on the Damocles and Noah, the Excalibur is built in a monocoque design with oversized round tubes. Here's a good tip for you: If you're interested in assessing the likely stiffness of a frame without even riding it, inspect the girth of its tubing junctures -- that's where the tale is told. It's analogous to a suspension bridge or a tall tree, where beefy ends give the structure as a whole resistance to torsional flex. Take a long look at the headtube/down tube juncture and the down tube/BB juncture of the Excalibur and then utter one big "WOW."

While you might look at the Excalibur and think it's a mere kermesse bike -- the sort of "grip it and rip it" rocketship suited for little more than the warp speed sub-2 hour circuit races so popular throughout Ridley's homeland of Belgium, think again. It was the team bike of the UCI Continental Pro Team Unibet, led by riders no less formidable than former Tour de France Green Jersey winner Baden Cooke and Liege-Bastogne-Liege champion (and infamous bon viveur) Frank Vandenbroucke. Unibet riders cracked the top-20 in 6+ hour epics such as the Tour of Flanders and Paris-Roubaix, as well as a host of other rough-and-tumble spring classics on the worst roads of Belgium and northern France. Team Unibet knew the secret of the Excalibur: Its oversized tubing gives it top fuel racing-like acceleration and resistance to flex, but it won't brutalize you when you head out the door for a 5-hour cruise in your 53x19.