Miguel Indurans TDF bike for auction.

Looks a little small for Indurian. Sounds like a lottery replica or some sort. Write the auction company makes them look bad, more like FleaBay. :twisted:

ming45":2or4zh53 said:

Looks a little small for Indurian. Sounds like a lottery replica or some sort. Write the auction company makes them look bad, more like FleaBay. :twisted:

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I have written to the auction house and they have not responded. I believe the size could even be correct for Indurain and it might even be one of his bikes, it is simply not a 1995 bike. This is absolutely certain. The bike looks more like perhaps a 1992 or 1993 bike when Indurain was riding Excell tubing and when Pinarello was perhaps the only manufacturer using 26 mm fork blades instead of the then more common 24 mm. These features do correspond to the auction bike. All the rest also seems to correspond with an earlier Indurain bike.

However when you are aiming at getting a thousand-fold premium on the market value of the bike due to provenance, you need to not only be close, you need to be perfectly correct. For the same £20-30K that they foresee getting for this bike, I know where one could get a confirmed and certified Eddy Merckx bike, plus a confirmed and certified Masi with original build sheet used to win a world championship in the 60's plus plus plus.

If the bike is a replica, the bike is worth less than £1K. If it is a confirmed and certified team bike from a lesser rider it might be worth £2K max. A suspected Indurain bike might also reach £2K-3K without full documents either because somebody is willing to take the risk or because they say it is still less than a modern bike that is not truly better in any appreciable way, or they have some insider information that has not yet been provided.

A pity they couldn't even pump the tyres up either!

The reserve price is a joke ... I'd say £3k max ....

As stated above I'd want plenty of provenance to back up this bike ...

hamster":e04yemz7 said:

A pity they couldn't even pump the tyres up either!

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You're missing the point of the vendor and auctioneer. The air that is still in the tyres is the original air from when the bike was owned by Induran, so therefore if the tyres were pumped up that would be taking away from the originality of said bike

Lovely bike - but it simply looks "wrong" with the seat slammed so low...

£20 - £30k without cast iron provenance, good luck with that...

I have received a response from the auction house and they do have some documentation on Banesto letterhead paper that would make your average person believe that it is indeed Indurain's 1995 bike. The problem is that there is no way to actually tie the particular bike to the letter. By this I mean to say that one could easily have a legitimate letter but one has no way to prove that the letter refers to this particular bike because there is no serial number or photographic reference so that one can verify if the letter that appears to be fully authentic was written about this bike.

On gut feel its likely to be genuine from the context but without preferably MIs signature on a COA, its not going to be worth silly money to a collector or Big Mig fan.

why not ask Mr Indurain himself if he rode it?
there must be a way of getting hold of him somehow

Did this sell?