One was a wall hanger that had never been on the ground, the other had a few hundred miles on it and I sold it to a BF member.īillato was no slouch. I picked up 2 of those Billato Team Z bikes from a SoCal collector back in 2007. The Billato era bikes were red on top, yellow in the middle and light blue on the bottom. 55cm seat tube by 57cm top tube center to center. I think that they were painted by Joe Bell in SoCal?ĭella Santa build sheet for Greg Lemond, January, 1990. The frames that Della Santa built had this color scheme: dark blue top, Dayglo yellow middle and red bottom. Many came in as bare frames and were painted by 'TSD' because they felt that they could apply a better job. Ten Speed Drive Imports in Florida was the primary importer of those frames into the US. The Billato Brothers located in Padua, Italy were by and large the largest producers of Team Z era Lemond frames. Subsequent bikes were produced by several different European builders mainly in Italy. Most of the first Team Z frames or at least the ones for Lemond were made by Roland Della Santa RIP. IMHO unless a team member actually rode it it is a replica A good example of a replica is those purple and yellow ADR bikes that show up with Alle tubing and Xxenon that often show up. Then as noted the “replica” bikes which usually fall into a lower grade of tubing and kit. Then there are team spec bikes, that is the same tubing and kit that the team used. So my questions is - what is a replica frame? is it essentially a true Team Z bike that maybe wasn't used by the team? is is a step down in tube quality? is it a full-on, repainted knock-off?Īny help there? just wondering what I should look for when I go check out the bike this weekend.Any pics or a link? What tubing is it? There are true team bikes, those being used by the actual team members. Found a couple bikes on ebay that claim to be 'replicas', but they're still asking for a decent amount of money for a replica frame. I came across a Team Z bike (not sure exact year yet), and I was doing some research on what it might be worth.

Greg lemond team z frame