GT Superbike I

After the '92 Olympics Richard Long (Co-Founder of GT) decided to sponsor the US Cycling team. At the time, GT was mainly a MTB and BMX cycling company so track was a completely different side of cycling for them. They hired the best of the best to create a bike for the next Olympics, the '96 Atlanta games. Hence the project was nicknamed "Project 96". This is when the GT Superbike was born. The first Iteration of the bikes was the GT Superbike I--This bike was made of helicopter strut aluminum and was made as a prototype of what was to come later. It had smooth welds and was incredibly narrow, so narrow that Mavic was contracted to machine special components special to this frame. This included: custom crankset/rings, a narrow BB, narrow front and rear wheels, narrow seatpost, custom handlebars and fork. The bike itself was only slightly wider than the wheels. It was made this way because for the first time, with the help ($) of GT, they had the funds to build and test the bikes in wind tunnels. In 1994 13 Sb1's were built for the US cycling team. These bikes won many awards all over the world (see below) up until the 1996 Atlanta Olympic games where the GT Superbike II was revealed. The Sb2 is the carbon iteration which had no top tube or seat-stays. A carbon version of the sb1 was also made by Brent Trimble around this same time. Unfortunately, a few things went wrong in the end...Richard Long died just before the Olympics, the bikes did not preform as expected (only 2 medals in Atlanta), the riders said they had very little time with the bikes and felt more comfortable on the sb1 but were denied the use of the sb1 as the sb2 had cost over a million dollars to manufacture. Around 10 GT Sb2's were made. Soon after the UCI decided the bikes were becoming too radical and new rules were set in place where bikes such as the sb1 and sb2 were now banned. The Sb3 is the last iteration of these bikes and it was made to conform to the UCI regulations. It was made of aluminum by Tiemeyer and look very similar, expect it had ugly welds and used regular Dura Ace components.