Colnago's radical new aero bike breaks cover at UAE Tour Women

Colnago's radical-looking new aero bike, the Y1Rs, has been raced for the first time at the UAE Tour Women this week.

The bike was unveiled in December, and is an aero option for UAE Team ADQ and UAE Team Emirates XRG for this season, but was not raced at the Tour Down Under last month; instead, the teams waited for their home race to ride it competitively.

It features innovative tube designs, aggressive geometry, its own integrated aero cockpit, and dispenses with the traditional triangle shape, instead boasting an irregular pentagon.

The model has been raced by Elisa Longo Borghini, Silvia Persico, Sofie Van Rooijen, Elynor Bäckstedt, Lara Gillespie, and Karlijn Swinkels in the deserts of the UAE, with Van Rooijen sprinting to seventh place on the new bike on stage one of the race.

On stage two, Gillespie, Longo Borghini and Swinkels finished third, fourth and fifth, respectively, after battling through crosswinds to make the first echelon on their aerodynamically optimised bikes.

It is not known yet if the men's UAE team will take the same approach at the UAE Tour, which begins a week on Monday, on 17 February. The Colnago V4Rs, which was previously used all the time - and didn't hold Tadej Pogačar back from winning 25 times in 2024 - is still available to the riders too.

“We started working on this bike in late 2021, which makes it the longest bike development in Colnago’s history,” Davide Fumagalli, Head of R&D at Colnago, said when launching the new Y1Rs. “We haven’t had an aero bike in our range since 2016 because, up until now, we haven’t found a significant benefit in performance over a bike like the V4Rs.

“So, why did we change our minds? Because with the change in two UCI rules, we recognised the opportunity to create a bike that is substantially better. The three-to-one aspect ratio rule [that stipulated that bar and stem tube depths cannot be more than three times their width] was dropped in favour of imposing an 80mm maximum and 10mm cross-section, which has enabled us to reduce the frontal area of the bike.

"The other rule enables us to place the seat post anywhere along the top tube; it no longer needs to be connected to the seat tube.”