To many cyclists, lusting after high-end road bikes is as much a part of the allure of our sport as actually riding.
These machines can be expensive – often prohibitively so – but they remain undeniably exciting, leading to the whiling away of many a lunch break browsing your favourite cycling magazine or website.
Even if our budget doesn’t allow us to shop with legitimate intent, trickle-down technology means that the cutting-edge innovations we covet today may become accessible to us in the future. So captivated we are that we continue to browse, even if purchasing a new bike isn’t on the horizon at all.
For a long time, the major selling point of a road bike was its weight. Aerodynamics had grown in importance, but it wasn’t until the early 2010s that manufacturers really started investing in ‘aero’ when designing bikes. Soon after, the aero road bike category was born.
For a time, this meant brands often had two race bikes in their stable; one for climbing mountains and another for sprinters or flatter terrain. Some even had a third ‘endurance’ bike, which were favoured by amateurs and occasionally raced on the cobbled roads of the Spring Classics.
Many still operate that three-bike stable, but things have moved on a little. Aero bikes have become lighter, lightweight bikes have become more aero, and some brands have even converged the two into a single ‘one bike to rule them all’.
While you’d think that makes things simple when buying, the truth is that buying a road bike can still be complicated.
Nowadays, it’s rare to find a new bike launch without aerodynamic claims that look something like “10 watts faster at 40km/h,” or “27 seconds faster over 40km.” In isolation, those claims can be handy, but they rarely help us get a sense of the bigger picture.
Often, brands will compare their latest launch with their own outgoing model; or another bike in their range. Almost never will you see a brand compare its bike to the competition, but this is we suspect down to legal reasons or differences in testing protocols; you can bet your bottom dollar they’re all doing competitor analysis.
That’s where we come in.
(Image credit: Sam Gupta)
We took 11 of today’s best road bikes (as well as an old rim-brake bike from 2015 as a baseline) to the wind tunnel for a back-to-back test to find out which was fastest, which was slowest, and how much faster they are than that baseline. We also ran some additional tests on position and wheel upgrades, which we…
