If you move bikes on highways, you’ve had the thought. You glance in the mirror at 110 km/h and picture a frame bouncing down the pavement, carbon and dreams turning to shrapnel under a transport truck. Then you tell yourself your rack is fine, your straps are tight and that kind of thing happens to other people.
For Meaford rider and firefighter Jason Bayens, it stopped being a hypothetical just after midnight on the 401. His dream build, a nearly new Devinci Troy, vanished off the back of his truck somewhere around Bowmanville.
“It was basically brand new,” he says. “I’d only ridden it once.”
The rush, the old rack and the perfect storm
The plan changed late. Instead of rolling out to Mont-Sainte-Anne for the World Cup on Thursday morning, Jason and his partner decided to get a jump on the drive and leave Wednesday night. The usual pre-trip chaos kicked in. Bikes loaded in a rush. Old habits doing the heavy lifting.
He reached for an old tray-style hitch rack. Nothing fancy. A budget SportRack from Canadian Tire that had done serious mileage over the years. South Carolina. The East Coast. Highlands. No problems.
“I’ve used that old bike rack lots of times and never had an issue,” he says.
He loaded Heather’s e-bike closest to the truck because of the weight. The new Troy went on the outside. That was strike one.
Strike two was the frame. The Troy’s steep, sloping top tube sat in the cradle at just the wrong angle. Later, in the shop, Jason realized he could roll the bike sideways out of the clamp without it biting any harder. The geometry simply did not play nice with that style of rack.
Strike three was love. To protect the fresh paint, he wrapped the top tube in a soft microfiber. And for once he skipped the usual cable lock through the frames.
“I didn’t want that bouncing around against the frame for eight hours,” he says. “I didn’t want to scratch it.”
You can see where this is going.
Thankfully the bike was RideWrapped. R.I.P. Jason Bayens photo.
The midnight wave
They stopped for fuel in Collingwood. He checked the rack. Everything looked fine. Back on the road. The sky was black. The highway was busy. Cruise contraol was set.
Then a van eased up beside them, hazards on, people waving hard to the shoulder.
“Immediately I assumed either we were getting robbed or something was actually wrong,” he says.
He stepped out, glanced back and felt his stomach drop. The rack was there. Heather’s bike was there. The Troy was gone.
“My heart sunk,” he says.
The people from the van filled in the rest: the bike had come off, hit the pavement and a transport truck had run it over almost instantly.
They drove to the next exit, looped back, scanned both sides of the highway in the dark. Nothing. The ditch was steep and deep. Stopping on foot on the 401 was out of the question.
“We talked about looping back one more time and didn’t figure it was worth it,” he says.
The cab went quiet. Hours of silence to Montreal. One brand-new bike gone somewhere in the dark.
The expensive lesson
Back home, Jason pulled the old rack apart and re-created the setup. It all made sense. The clamp and top tube angle let the Troy sneak out instead of locking harder. Compressing the frame to “be safe” may have turned it into a spring. The microfiber made it slick. No backup strap. No safety line.
“It’s essentially my fault,” he says. No excuses. No blaming ghosts or mystery thieves at the On Route.
Devinci, to their credit, stepped up with their customer assistance program even though they didn’t have to.
His local shop Total Sports in Midland had a new Troy in for him within days. It still hurt, but less than starting from scratch.
“Pretty stand up,” he says. “Considering I had no proof and it was my mistake.”
How a meticulous guy loses a bike at 110
Here is the part that should make every rider pay attention. Jason is not clueless. He’s a firefighter. He teaches rope rescue. He welds, fixes, fabricates. If you need a canoe patched, aluminum welded or a commercial gym built, Bayens is your guy.
“I’m pretty meticulous about that type of stuff,” he says.
That is exactly why this story matters. This was not a loose bungee on a clapped-out hardtail. It was a smart rider stacking small decisions that all leaned the same way until the system failed. Old rack. New school frame shape. Cosmetic protection. No redundancy. Night highway.
It is a reminder that, “it’s always been fine” is not the same as, “it is actually safe.”
Last seen…. Jason Bayens photo.
What every rider can learn from Jason’s 401 yard sale
Jason has already retired the old rack. He is blunt about what he would do differently and what he thinks everyone should do now, before their own heart-sinking mirror check.
•Stress test your setup sideways
We all reef on bikes up and down after we clamp them. Add a side-to-side test. Try to roll the frame out of the rack. If you can move it anywhere near free, change something.
•Know your frame vs your rack
Modern enduro frames with wild top tubes do not always belong on old racks. If the clamp follows the same angle as the tube, it may never truly bite.
•Redundancy is cheap
“Take a lesson from my old man,” Jason says. “Have a secondary means of attachment.”
One extra cam strap around the frame and mast. A second strap on each wheel. A simple cable looped through every frame and clipped back to the rack. None of it looks cool. All of it keeps your $8,000 dream build out from under a transport.
•Be honest about old gear
If your rack is bent, rusty or older than some of the kids on your group ride, stop trusting it blindly. Retire it or demote it to hardware store runs.
The story you never want to tell
Jason can laugh about it now. There is a new Troy waiting. The trip was still good. The lesson is paid for.
But somewhere along a steep-sided stretch of the 401 there is—or was—a mangled carbon ghost of a perfect bike, sacrificed to remind the rest of us that the nightmare is real.
Check your racks. Add a strap. Scratch the paint before the pavement does it for you.