Selle Italia Turbo "Bernard Hinault"

A real classic saddle: Selle Italia's Turbo.
I wasn't an early adept and I haven't used it for a long time either.
But it used to be a very fine saddle in the beginning and still lots of people (bike lovers and pro riders) like it. The first generation of Turbo was just good and perhaps all later generations failed to make improvements on the original design.
This was one of the products that became famous/popular, because it was the choice of Bernard Hinault. Of course, he was paid to use this saddle. But throughout the years he hardly changed his equipment and for sure he wouldn't have used a certain saddle that long if he didn't really like it.
Well, Hinault won the Tour de France 5 times and lots of other races, too, so the saddle became an icon.
Still some work to be done to let it shine "as new" again.
The pictures below show the saddle how I got it, second hand.
The Turbo saddle was introduced in 1990 and I got my first a couple of years later. I bought it when I got my first Colnago Super frame and it looked lovely on that bike. Until that moment, I used San Marco Concor. After a while, when I joined Gazelle, so it must have been around 1984 or 1985, I switched to the newly introduced San Marco Rolls. Gazelle had better ties with San Marco than with Selle Italia.
Much later, first half of the 1990s, I rode a Turbo Matic 2 for a while. That may have been another successful type of Turbo. Less iconic than the genuine Turbo though.

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