Spence Canon about the Design of Ritte Bikes

After seeing the beautiful video about the Lotus Esprit on Petrolicious, we couldn’t resist contacting Spence Canon, the founder of Ritte Cycles, to ask him if his car restorations influence the way he sees, designs and makes Bikes. Here’s what the Designer of some of the world’s most captivating bike designs answered:

My love for car design and driving clearly influences my own bike designs, but I am not always conscious of the connection.

Since I was a child I have loved both bikes and cars. I wanted to be a race car driver and a car designer, and I would draw pictures of bikes and cars all day. At the age of 12, I began racing bikes, and they have been a big part of my life ever since. I like the simplicity of bicycles; I like how connected I am to the road and how agile and responsive a bike feels. Once I was old enough to drive, I found a 1973 Porsche 914 and I began to understand how similar the connection between a simple sports car and a race bike can be. I loved the raw sound of the engine, the stiffness of the suspension and the feeling that I was directly connected to the road. To ride or drive quickly, you have to be smooth, follow the most efficient line and balance the weight carefully between the front and rear. Driving and riding can be so similar in these ways.

How did this passion evolve?

Now that designing bikes is my job, it’s healthy for me to look beyond bikes for inspiration. I want to make Ritte bikes both unique and beautiful, and I think that it’s too easy to simply copy what other bike companies do. So instead of looking at other bikes all day, I look at and restore cars. Car design has a long history. And every car design is a solution to a problem: to transport more, to be faster, to be more efficient, to communicate one’s style and status, or to simply make a statement. The best cars are mechanical solutions wrapped in art. There is so much to appreciate and learn from studying them. A bicycle is about solving small problems too: How do the tube shapes join together? How does the bike balance and handle? For instance, with our carbon bikes, I want to have large tube volumes to increase strength, but I don’t want the frames to look bloated or heavy. Some decisions are purely functional, and some are aesthetic. But I won’t ever sacrifice function for looks.

So how are your designs influenced in particular?

In graphic design and paint design, I think I am influenced by sports and race cars from the 60s and 70s. The colours used were bold and unusual. They were solid colours, without metallic flake. They were rich colours, like dark orange, light blue and lime green. And the race cars’ graphics were often simple, with large stripes or blocks of colour.

I now have a small number of cars that I have restored. I’d like to point out that they’re not expensive ones, but I have put a lot of time into them and they are special cars to me. The 1989 Lotus Esprit that I have was in very bad shape when I bought it. But it is a beautiful design. Very balanced-looking, with a presence that really moves a person when they stand beside it. It’s a very wide and long car, but it’s very light as well. Its composite body shell was actually made using a very similar method to how contemporary carbon bike frames are made. In fact, I was designing the Ace road bike at the same time that I was restoring the Lotus, so I think that some of its design affected the bike: there are some hard lines and flat planes. It has large surfaces but is elegant and slim in the right places. The colour as well – my restorations left an impression on the colour of many of our bikes.

More information can be found on the Ritte website.

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Words: Spence Canon Photos: Ritte