The new Scott Addict RC hopes light still makes right
It's stunningly feathery, but I wonder if the idea behind it is perhaps more meaningful.
My journey into the depths of weight-weenieism hit its stride in 2008.
That was the year I registered my Weight Weenies forum profile, and also the year I got to ride Scott’s then-revolutionary first-generation Addict RC when I used it as a testbed for SRAM’s original Red groupset. Finished off with a set of Lightweight carbon tubulars, that bike was gloriously light but also brutally stiff and without a shred of care about aerodynamic efficiency, and yet I loved it so. That same year I also bought for myself a Cervelo R3-SL frameset, which was close to the same weight, but whose more advanced tube shaping (anyone else remember “Squoval”?) yielded a much more coddling experience. I threw every lightweight bit at it that I could, and remember how proud I was at hitting 6.12 kg (13.5 lb) on the scale. Looking back, it easily could have been substantially lighter had my wallet been a little fatter.
I’ve since become more of a recovering weight weenie, if you will, but I still raised my eyebrows when I received the media kit for Scott’s fourth-generation Addict RC. Key figures: the claimed weight for the lightest frame in a medium size is just 599 g (599 grams!) – roughly the equivalent of one full standard-sized water bottle – and the matching fork adds just 270 g (with the steerer trimmed for a medium frame). I’ll save you the time: that’s 869 g for both the frame and fork, or lighter than most high-end carbon road frames alone. The flagship complete model is supposedly sub-6 kg.
Is my interest piqued? Yeah, you could say so. Old habits die hard.
An obsessive approach
For comparison, that old Addict RC I had was supposedly 780 g, so we’re talking a difference of 181 g, or about two standard water bottles – empty ones at that. I know, I know, put in those terms, Scott’s announcement today sounds like a big ol’ ‘meh’ as far as the impact that sort of weight savings will have on the everyday rider, particularly considering that comparison pits two frames against each other that span 16 years of development time.
That said, the engineer in me is still in awe of Scott’s achievements here, and I think it’s worth putting that number into context to fully appreciate it.
Put another way, that 181 g represents nearly a 25% reduction in the total frame mass from that old bike. The difference from the outgoing MY2020 Addict RC is a slightly more modest 161-172 g (depending on model), but the percentage difference is positively massive. The fork has also gone on a weight-loss plan, dropping 49-54 g from the current version and bringing claimed figures below the magical 300 g mark.
Scott doesn’t indicate any major changes in materials used to hit that number, either – no “super hi-mod” or aerospace-grade or military-spec or whatever. It’s seemingly all down to a new production process the company calls PP Mandrel. The frame is molded in four separate sections – the front triangle, left rear triangle, right rear triangle, and seatpost clamp insert – and then each joint is bonded and overwrapped.
The “PP Mandrel” refers to how frame section is laid up around a single net-shaped, semi-rigid “plastic molding core” (which I’m assuming is both made of polypropylene and inflatable to create internal pressure, although Scott didn’t specify as such). Scott says the process yields super smooth internal finishes and leaves no “dead end” tubes (meaning no internal sections of the frame are walled off from other parts, which would leave excess material behind).
Scott does say, however, that the external shape of the frame was partially dictated by this new PP Mandrel manufacturing technique. Smooth tube transitions and gradual changes in cross-sections were key to that, and conveniently, both of those things are good for structural efficiency in general, anyway.
Overall, Scott says the new Addict RC “frame kit” is a substantial 300 g lighter than before, and the flagship Addict RC Ultimate complete bike comes in at just 5.9 kg (13.01 lb) with a SRAM Red AXS groupset and Syncros Capital SL full-carbon wheels. For the sake of comparison, the Specialized S-Works Aethos I tested four years ago was 6.10 kg (13.45 lb).
It’s worth pointing out that while the “frame kit” is supposedly 300 g lighter than before, the new frame and fork only account for about 215 g of those savings. The rest was trimmed off bit by bit from nearly every single other small part.
For example, Scott says the new rear derailleur hanger (which isn’t UDH, by the way) is 1.1 g lighter than before. The new wedge-type hidden seatpost clamp? 3.1 g lighter. There’s a particularly cool – and very skeletal-looking – out-front computer mount that tips the scales at just 12 g instead of the old version’s 38 g. And the new headset compression ring? Scott says it’s 0.3 g lighter than before (hopefully without compromising any functionality in such a critical part). For reference, 0.3 g is about the same weight as a single grain of rice. Obsessive? Yeah, maybe a little.
A bigger portion – 40 g – was trimmed out of the updated one-piece Syncros IC-R100-SL carbon fiber cockpit with its more pared-down stem clamp design that looks more like something you’d see from a boutique brand like AX-Lightness or Darimo.
The claimed breakdown is as follows:
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