It’s a bike that has been the first across the finish line in countless races throughout the 2025 season, and one that’s contributed to the most successful WorldTour team campaign ever, with Team UAE Team Emirates-XRG. The Colnago Y1Rs has made quite a statement in its sophomore year.
Looking at the wins per bike, the Colnago Y1Rs has been the dominant force in the men’s field, thanks in large part, of course, to Tadej Pogačar. It’s even more impressive considering that many of Colnago’s wins before May came from the V4RS (and latterly the V5Rs). Tadej Pogacar’s Tour of Flanders victory and Isaac del Toro’s Giro d’Italia stage win serve as prime examples.
After that, and with the Spring Classics out of the way, it was raced almost exclusively, with the V5Rs confined to the sidelines, especially in the men’s peloton. The Y1Rs quickly became the dominant winning machine across both men’s and women’s fields, especially with modifications such as the stripping back of the Y1Rs’ paint, used to great effect by Pogačar.
We’ve already reviewed the bike out on the roads, but subjective measures can only tell you so much. To get a real understanding of the nuance behind the bike’s performance, we took it to the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub wind tunnel alongside 11 competitors, to put it under the microscope and extract some objective data about the Italian brand’s flagship aero machine.
The test
To test, we used the bike in its off-the-shelf specification, but with a couple of key non-variables to help make data between bikes more consistent. You can read the full, comprehensive test details in the main write-up linked above, but for this article, I’ve summarised the process below.
We tested in three conditions: bike-only, bike with rider, and bike-only with Enve SES 4.5 wheels. The bike had a 56cm frame, while the geometry was matched up as identically as possible to other bikes we tested. Similarly, a 25mm Continental GP5000 S TR front tyre was used for every single test due to the bias given to the front tyre and impact on drag as the first point of contact for the airflow.
The inner tube’s valve length and tyre pressure were also not altered, and…
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