Reigning time trial World Champion Marlen Reusser has posted an image of herself on Instagram riding what appears to be a new Canyon TT bike. “Me, riding on a pretty nice bike,” reads the caption.
The Movistar rider currently rides the Canyon Speedmax CFR TT – the machine she powered to the rainbow stripes in Kigali last September. But the dazzle camouflage paint job suggests this is almost certainly the next-generation Speedmax in prototype form.
The timing fits the familiar ‘official leak’ pattern: a camo bike appears on a star rider’s feed in the spring, and the covers come off somewhere between the Giro d’Italia and the Tour de France.
So what’s new? It’s quite hard to tell thanks to the paintwork, but what we can see is that the fork crown looks wider than the current Speedmax’s – similar to the Factor Hanzo or outlandish Factor One road bike. It’s also more deeply integrated into the head tube area, suggesting Canyon has prioritised extreme aero integration at the front end. The seat post is similarly reworked: a longer, more pronounced aerofoil profile that sits deeper and flush with the frame, rather than simply emerging from it.
The seat tube/top tube junction appears extended forward in a way that brings to mind the Cervélo P5’s ‘forward’ seat cluster arrangement where it appears the stays extend into the main triangle in near parallel with the downtube.
Reusser is also running twin disc wheels, which tells you nothing about the frame but everything about the intentions of the test ride. The image we’ve seen shows no drive side detail sadly.
What’s perhaps more interesting is what the bike doesn’t look like. Several manufacturers in the current design cycle have leaned heavily on their track frames for inspiration for new TT bikes, transferring silhouettes and tube shapes directly across.
The current Speedmax track bike has a distinctive look, yet this prototype doesn’t appear to borrow as faithfully from it as some other brands have done with their recent TT bikes. This suggests Canyon’s aero engineers may have started from a different brief – perhaps one shaped by more recent CFD and wind tunnel learnings around forward-of-rider airflow management, rather than strictly by the closed-circuit track world.
Watch this space—and the start ramp at the next TT on Movistar’s calendar.
We contacted Canyon for comment.
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