First seen at the Australian National Road Race championships and then in detail at the Tour Down Under, the news that Factor is launching an all-new Ostro will shock nobody, but today is the day that the brand’s aero bike gets its big reveal.
Complete with ‘Zoned aero development,’ it follows the trend du jour of focussing on aero performance at the front of the bike and reducing weight at the rear, in a bid to have as fast a bike as possible while also sticking as closely as possible to the UCI minimum weight limit of 6.8kg.
It does this despite Factor also having the lightweight O2 VAM in its range, and marks a slight shift in the brand’s communication of that bike from its best all-rounder race bike to something more aimed at leisure riders.
The launch also sees the introduction of another pair of Black Inc wheels. Similar to how the O2 VAM was accompanied by the 28/33 wheelset, today’s Ostro VAM launch is accompanied by the new 48/58 wheels; unsurprisingly a deeper option more suited to the bike’s aero aims.
Naturally, the Daft Punk-style claims of faster, lighter, better, stronger also accompany the launch, including a seven watt improvement in aerodynamic performance at 48kph, borne out of a CdA improvement of 0.0055.
There’s also a claimed weight reduction of (a very specific) 267.8 grams for the ‘premium package with wheels’. A 56cm frame in the raw carbon colourway is reportedly 820g. We’ll get into the details where this saving was achieved shortly.
Factor also claims a saving of over two minutes across Stage 9 of the 2023 Tour de France (which Michael Woods won on the outgoing OSTRO, hence its relevance).
Zoned development
As is becoming increasingly common in bike launches of late, Factor wanted to squeeze all the aero gains out of the front of the bike and focus more on weight reduction at the rear.
To this end, the brand worked from front to back shaping the front of the bike to help steer the airflow favourably around the rest of the bike and the rider.
Engineers also split the bike into five zones; fork, head tube, top tube, seat tube and downtube. Each was given targets related to aerodynamic performance, weight and stiffness, with a broad aim to increase aerodynamics, reduce weight, while maintaining a similar stiffness to the outgoing Ostro VAM.
For the fork, Factor says “we would only accept an aerodynamic gain if it could be…
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