The new Tarmac is the lightest bike we've ever made, but what makes it so outstanding is its utter completeness as a race bike. Its handling, regardless of size, is sublime, while its aero advantage slays the competition. It truly is the complete race bike, and it's about to take your riding to a whole new level.
When it was time to design a new Tarmac, we looked to pro racing to decide how we should improve it. And with the more extreme needs of the top pros, we knew we’d need Rider-First Engineered™ handling, but in a lighter, faster, and smoother package. To pull this off, we had to turn traditional design on its head, but without a doubt, it’s the fastest, most complete race bike you’ve ever ridden.
Through our partnership with Retül, we have access to over 40,000 rider's digital fit data, and through this, we've changed how we tackle our approach to fit and frame geometry.
The way forward is to reimagine our frame geometry by analysing our fit data, not by gender, but simply by experience. For competitive road riders, we looked at the collective of all riders' stack and reach of the handlebar positions and concluded that there was no statistical difference in position correlating to gender. There was, however, the need to accommodate for handlebar width, crankarm length, and saddle preferences, which lead us to create separate models of Men's and Women's Tarmacs bikes built on shared frame geometries.
Rider-First Engineered™ provides a uniform experience for all riders, regardless of their frame size, so everyone receives the exact performance the Tarmac was intended for—fast and predictable. For the new Tarmac, however, we’ve updated our process to take more than just handling into consideration. Through our strategic partnership with McLaren Applied Technologies, we integrated a structural analysis simulation that led us to a design that sees three unique forks for the different frame sizes of the Tarmac. Each fork attaches to the frame through a 1.5-inch lower bearing, while a new carbon layup was developed in exacting, painstaking detail. Through these technologies, all seven sizes have tailored levels of stiffness, making the experience for each rider exactly the same—stiff, yet compliant, snappy, yet aero, and of course, fast.
We know that aerodynamics is the most important thing we can do to make you faster, but we didn't want to add one gram or change stiffness at all in this pursuit. We discovered three areas where we could add aero for free—a new fork shape, dropped seatstays with aero tubes, and a d-shaped seatpost and seat tube. The result? A bike that’s approximately 45 seconds faster over 40 kilometres compared to other lightweight bikes in the same weight category.
