Rael Concept Bike

The Rael V6 represents years of revising an earlier concept dating back to 2010. It started as a side project to showcase some of my ideas and continued to evolve as the market changed along with new solutions I had come up with. The first version quickly became a viral hit, eventually being one of the BicycleDesign.net's Top 25 posts of all time, second only to the Specialized McLaren in popularity.

I challenged myself to find a better way of doing things but only if it was not unnecessarily complicated. Unlike many concept bikes shown online, this was never meant to be a simple styling exercise. Every detail has been engineered to a point of being nearly production-ready, in particular the unique steering assembly. I wanted to create a road bike that takes into consideration how they are used in the real world and not just by professionals. It needed to be extremely capable but also realistic while challenging how things have always been done, in particular the brake levers. The Rael is more of a cohesive module rather than an assortment of mail-order components hung on a beautiful carbon frame. The end result is a cleaner, safer and more purposeful form-factor that eschews having to make a one-size-fits-all approach.