COMPONENTS: Look Quartz

Delivery time: February 2008

Look Quartz

QUARTZ PEDAL
The old Look S2R pedal was a big, bulbous contraption that, although short-lived, attracted hard-core devotees including cross-country legend Tinker Juarez. But for all its attributes—large, stable platform and bomber durability among them—the S2R was too heavy for most tastes. It took a while for Look to come up with the new Quartz design, but a peek at the prototypes indicates that Look is serious about its efforts. Three models of the Quartz will be offered—the Quartz Carbon Ti, Quartz Carbon and Quartz each with the same basic design.

Although we weren’t able to ride the pedals in Los Gatos, the prototypes we examined have a clean, simple design. The Quartz offers a fairly large platform and weighs about 230 grams per pair, which would be lighter than its main competitors in that price range. And Look feels its simple, open design makes the Quartz an excellent mud shedder.

One of the reasons the Quartz is so light is that it has no coil spring. A possible drawback to the design is that it doesn’t offer adjustable tension. We’ll know more when the pedal is released in a few months, but pro racers including Laurence Leboucher and Miguel Martinez have been testing the Quartz for nearly a year.