Pro bike: Team TotalEnergies' Enve Melee debuts with an all-Enve build

Enve has been building its presence in the peloton with its sleek, carbon SES wheels and cockpits already adorning the Colnagos of UAE Team Emirates. This year, for the first time, the premium US brand equips a pro team from head to toe – or more accurately tyre to bar – with its equipment.

The TotalEnergies UCI ProTeam team have lost Peter Sagan, who has retired from top-flight road racing, and with him bike sponsor Specialized, but they have gained what might now be the most envied (pun intended) bike in the pack.

James Startt photographed the bike of TotalEnergies’ Alan Jousseaume at the four-day Tour de la Provence at the beginning of February.

The Melee frame is the centrepiece, developed after Enve’s first foray into framebuilding with the US-made Custom Road. The Melee, launched in 2022, takes its design cues from the Custom Road according to Enve, but instead of customisation it prioritises “efficiency and speed”. It is a monocoque that's Asian made, with Enve clearly prioritising those two characteristics for its manufacturing too.

The frame, which has a claimed weight of 850g, was developed to be fastest with Enve’s own SES wheels, with its tube shapes designed to work best with the Enve rim shapes – a compatibility that’s highly valued by pro teams. Enve has a long history of being at the cutting edge of aerodynamic design, first working with British F1 engineer Simon Smart in 2009.

Something that raised eyebrows when the Melee was unveiled was its tyre clearance: space for 35mm rubber seemed at odds with the “speed” part of Enve’s claim – granted that wide tubeless tyres are generally more efficient. Although tyre clearance even for the most speed-orientated race bikes has been gradually increasing, even the brand new Factor Ostro VAM only has room for 32mm.

The frame the team will be using is of course – in accordance with UCI regulations – exactly the same that Enve customers can buy for £5,500 and comes in seven sizes and five fork rakes. At the moment just the colourway – the black with sky-blue highlights that has been up for grabs since Team Sky became Team Ineos – is exclusive to the team, with the consumer version coming only in the silver ‘Damascus’ for the time being.

The team can choose between one-piece or two-piece front ends: Jousseaume has opted for the Integrated Aero Stem and SES AR Handlebar – which completely conceals the cables as the one-piece cockpit does. It has a -7° rise and comes in lengths up to 130mm. Jousseaume has gone long, as most pros do, but unlike many of his counterparts, isn’t running it completely slammed. The 25-year-old Frenchman, who is 1m 77cm tall, is a puncheur/climber and clearly prefers the slightly more upright position for the mountains – though it’s still an aggressive position.

As for the wheels, Jousseaume is running Enve SES 4.5s, the second deepest option that the team have available to them but which still have a sub-1,500g claimed weight. The choice is between the US-made SES models that include the 2.3, 3.4, 4.5, and 6.7 – there’s a wheel for every type of parcours and wind condition.

The tyres are Enve SES tubeless 29mm and feature a little ‘Race Day’ logo with a chequered flag that suggests a pro team edition which, like the legendary Continental Competition Pro LTD tubular, probably isn't readily available at your local bike shop.

As you’d expect, Enve’s tyres are wind tunnel tested and feature a more accentuated tread pattern towards the outsides, designed to turbulate the airflow so that it doesn’t separate from the rim.

The only part of the bike apart from the groupset and bottle cages that isn’t made by Enve is the saddle – a Selle Italia Flite Boost Kit Carbonio. Why no Enve saddle? Enve has in the past partnered with Selle Italia but at the moment there’s no link-up for TotalEnergies.

Even though Enve currently produces two bottle cages, TotalEnergies is using Tacx Deva cages and Shiva bottles bearing the name of Tacx’s parent company, Garmin.

Jousseaume is running 54/40 chainrings with the Shimano Dura-Ace 9200 chainset – the bigger chainrings are favoured more frequently by pro riders now that 12-speed cassettes offer a broader spread of ratios without the fear of running out of gears at either end. The pedals are also Dura-Ace.

Jousseaume was a DNF at Tour de La Provence, but this is just the start of Enve's journey in professional racing.