I have just noticed that the AUK Website has been rated "cool" on the cool wall here on YACF, which kind of confirms what I always thought... follow me:
Audax is "unconventional" in that it doesn't follow the trend of "light and aero, fast and expensive, watts and carbon" which seems to be all the rage in the recreational cycling world and it's heavily marketed and advertised by the big players with no exception. This makes audax a bit quirky and that's the attraction. It certainly was for me. The market for quirky is actually quite big. Even Rapha realised that quirky sells!!
Having an old fashioned battered website fits in nicely with the image, a bit like those very busy greasy spoon cafes that don't even have a Website or they have one built in 1994.
Try and find a seat here at lunch time, they don't even have a website
Incidentally those places are often used as controls, which shows the synergy is real.
Is a modern, sleek interface going to make AUK mainstream? Frankly I hope not... with mainstream comes a cascade of unwanted collaterals like "liability", "support", "bad weather cancellations", "marshals", "charity donations", maybe even "profits" and all those things Audax rids of.
Maybe the stars really really wanted AUK to keep fixing the old banger indefinitely, with glue and gaffer tape if needs be, with sweat and tears, against the odds, and buying a new car (regardless of how expensive or performing) was a bad idea in the first place.
In a variant of the old adagio: "if it keeps breaking, keep fixin' it"