The race bike of choice of the XDS Astana WorldTour team, the X-Lab AD9 represents somewhat of a first, being the first Chinese bike brand to sponsor a WorldTour team, and with that offer a bike designed to compete with the well established players such as Cervélo, Colnago, Specialized and Trek, to name but four.
XDS, the carbon company behind the X-Lab bikes, claims that the bike has been designed in the wind tunnel and ‘rivals top aero bikes on the market’.
There are no integrated bottles like the Wilier Filante SLR ID2 or Trek Madone, or even the integrated cages such as those used on the Colnago Y1Rs or Argon18 Nitrogen Pro. The down tube is fairly wide and flares out around the bottle mounting points, which, on paper, should do a decent job of shrouding the bottles slightly and reducing their impact on the total drag.
And even those deep profile tubes are not quite as deep as the likes of the Ridley Noah Fast 3.0, or the Cervélo S5 with it’s bayonet fork and headtube design.
But as we have seen in our testing, looks is not the be-all and end-all of performance. Some outlandish designs have produced impressively fast frames, but then the addition of a rider onto the bike has altered the results standings.
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One thing of interest around the AD9 is the apparent lack of data. Looking on the XDS website, details around the bike are fairly scarce. Most of what we have to go on has been seeing the bikes in person at races.
XDS, or X-Labs, doesn’t…
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