Tadej Pogačar is to ride a lightweight prototype Colnago time trial bike at the Tour de Romandie which starts today, Tuesday April 28, with a 3.2-kilometre prologue time trial around Villars-sur-Glâne in the canton of Fribourg.
The Italian brand claims that the TT2’s frameset (frame, fork and seatpost) is 550 grams lighter than the current TT1's – that's a very substantial amount. In the press release the actual weight is not supplied: Colnago told us that the bike is still registered as a prototype under UCI rules and all the details will be communicated when the bike approaches commercialisation in September. However, we were told that the 550-gram difference was measured using the size S that Pogačar rides.
What it does say is that the challenge was to retain the aerodynamic performance of the TT1, launched back in 2022 as Colnago’s first disc-brake time trial bike, while significantly reducing weight. But, Colnago says, it did better than that: the TT2 tested faster by two watts at 50kph as a weighted average across the yaw sweep – not such a substantial amount, but still impressive considering efficient aerodynamic performance usually depends on deep tubes that are inevitably heavier.
The last time one of Pogačar’s bikes made headlines for being lighter was in the 2025 Tour de France uphill time trial when he used a raw carbon Y1Rs to save crucial grams.
For the new time trial bike, Colnago looks to have done more than just strip paint – and anyway, the TT1 was paintless already. The frame has a completely new design, moving away from the radical, angular geometry of the TT1 to a flowing silhouette that's more conventional – though at a closer look the tubes themselves are heavily profiled.
The TT1 featured seatstays that emerged horizontally from the seat tube, designed to line up with the top of the custom water bottle that filled in the lower part of the main triangle. The TT2’s seatstays are the more traditional sloping type, that are placed in parallel with the bottle rather than in a continuous line with it. The bottle cage mount appears to wrap around the down tube rather than attaching to it – clearly a watt-saving feature.
The bayonet-style front end has been abandoned for what looks like a regular steerer tube inside a head tube, while the fork blades are significantly less deep than before. It’s hard to make it out from the pictures supplied with the press release, which doesn’t give away information about how the new bike was engineered, but the new head tube might be slightly deeper than before, and additionally it looks as though it transitions into the top tube more smoothly. It looks as though a raised horizontal section is designed to channel air cleanly onto the top tube, too.
As for the fit geometry, Colnago says there are now four sizes instead of three, all of which have been provided to UAE Team Emirates and UAE Team ADQ riders: XS, S, M and L.
In terms of rider positioning, the small size remains unchanged. A new XS size has been introduced, while the M and L sizes now feature a significantly taller front end (again, no numbers provided yet). According to Colnago, this allows for improved fit across a wider range of riders, reducing the need for excessively tall spacer stacks or extension towers. We’re also seeing taller stack heights in aero road bikes such as the Felt Nexar – it’s not only challenging for aerodynamicists to factor in a tall stack of spacers into a bike’s performance in the wind tunnel, but high-arms positions send airflow around the torso instead of underneath it, resulting in lower drag numbers.
Pogačar will use the TT2 prototype in a size S when he rides the Tour de Romandie prologue tomorrow, a very short 3.2km time trial in the Fribourg suburb of Villars-sur-Glâne which is far from flat – and where a lighter time trial bike will give him an even bigger advantage over the competition than he already has.
As before, when Pogačar rode a Colnago ‘Prototipo’ in advance of the 2022 Tour de France – the bike that was eventually launched as the V4Rs – it’s clear the new TT bike is being built specifically for the four-time Tour de France winner. The final version will be made available to the public in September 2026.
