Publication-Bicycling Magazine

Date-April 2008

Title-Madone 5.5 Pro

Findings:

• A VENERABLE WINNER GETS TRICKED OUT
• POST LANCE: The original Madone was the bike of choice for seven-time Tour de France champ Lance Armstrong, but by the time he retired, the design was dated. Trek spent two years developing a new smart one.
• SMART TECH: We like the fresh take on seatmasts, which stiffens the frame while allowing more adjustability than many other designs, and requires no cutting. The bottom bracket is also innovative, with molded carbon sockets that hold cartridge bearings, eliminating the need for alloy cups-greatly enhancing stiffness, thinning the profile and saving about 40 grams.

Publication-Bicycling Magazine

Date-April 2009

Title-Madone 5.5 Pro

Findings:

• The Trek Madone is one of those rare-for-cycling marques that hangs on long enough to evolve into a much different bike than it was on debut. The original 2003 Madone was essentially a purchasable version of Lance Armstrong's race bike. Though I appreciated its function, I didn't like it. I thought the qualities that suited Lance (with his style of riding, win-at-all-costs personality and monumental fitness) made the bike so harsh, nervous and narrowly focused that it wouldn't be popular. I was wrong, of course. Since then, Trek's engineers have created more forgiving iterations, and the new Madone 5.5 Pro, made of the middle tier of Trek's three levels of OCLV carbon fiber, does the best job yet of finding the balance between performance and regular-guy rideability. This bike never beats you up or forces your to contort into an aggressive posture for hours at a time, yet thanks to the 90mm-wide bottom bracket, layup and choice of material, tube shaping, seatmast and other design wizardry, it leaps forward and carves through corners like a knife off the whetstone. Our testers judged the 5.5 Pro equal in ride feel to its rivals; the most effusive tester was a past Madone owner who raved about improvements in the weight, stiffness and long-ride comfort.
• The seatmast (more of an exoskeleton seatpost that fits over a long extension of the seat tube) offers 100mm of adjustment with no cutting. And this same bike-though in red-is available in a performance version that, for our 54cm test size, had identical trail, chainstay length and head and seat angles, but with an effective top tube one-tenth of a centimeter shorter and head tube 3 centimeters taller for a slightly more upright, compact reach to the bar. The bike is made to fit you-rather than forcing you to fit the bike.