To Make Riders Faster is the “inspirational but cautionary tale” of Gerard Vroomen and Phil White, who founded Cervélo Cycles as a basement project in Montreal, Canada and went on to see their bikes used by Tour de France winners and Olympic champions.
The book begins with Vroomen and White meeting at McGill University in 1995 and they soon develop a business partnership based around a shared interest in aerodynamics.
3T's design Guru, Gerard Vroomen talks about the future of the road bike
Shortly after, Vroomen is intent on getting a letter of interest to Giro d’Italia winner and two-time road world champion, Gianni Bugno, to ride their prototype Baracchi.
As this was the days before the internet made such things somewhat easier to find out, Vroomen didn’t know Bugno’s address, so he simply addressed the letter to “Gianni Bugno, Italy” in the hope that the Italian postal service would know where to deliver it. Turns out they did.
Described as part coffee-table book and part business biography, To Make Riders Faster is a 256-page hardback and costs 70 Canadian dollars, which is about £40. You can get a copy here.
It promises “a wild ride of success and setback” and the author should have a half-decent of how it all panned out – as well as working for the firm, Anna Dopico was married to White for 17 years.