Equipment

• Aero is everything”—we’ve been preaching it for years and it’s still the driving force for the new Tarmac. In our quest for tube shapes that deliver the fastest frame that the UCI rules allow, we took a page out of the Venge development book and utilized our FreeFoil Shape Library. Armed with a library of optimized shapes, we turned to the Win Tunnel to plug these shapes into a modular test bike, for more testing and validation. The result? A new Tarmac that’s the fastest we’ve tested—45 seconds faster over 40km than the Tarmac SL6. No compromises, just pure speed.

​

• While aerodynamics were paramount to the Tarmac’s development, and to the development of all of our race bikes, weight was the co-pilot on this optimal race bike journey. Previously “aero bikes” always compromised in the weight department—the more drag you reduced, the more weight you gained. With the new Tarmac, our design philosophy was to keep it at, or below, the UCI weight limit out of the box, with no sacrifices to aerodynamics. And with the help of the FreeFoil Shape Library, tools like isotopic FEA analysis, and some engineering wizardry by the best engineers in the industry, we delivered a frame that weighs a mere 800 grams, without giving up a gram of aero, stiffness or ride quality.