The Giant TCR has been such a successful road bike over the past 25 years that it’s easy to forget just how radical its design was when it first launched, and just how much influence it has had on road bike manufacturing ever since. Take a look at your own bike now – if it has a top tube that slopes down from head tube to seat tube, the original TCR was its ancestor.
Giant’s ‘total compact road’ geometry concept created such advantages in performance and production that it has become the standard way to build a road bike today. Fittingly, given the significance of the innovation, the story behind its conception is remarkable – it involves an eccentric British engineer, a scrap mountain bike frame, a bunch of new rules from the UCI and a dramatic shift in the landscape of global trade…
Radical roots
The career path followed by British engineer Mike Burrows, the TCR’s inventor,
