The new Canyon Aeroad’s palmarès already includes Jasper Philpsen’s three Tour de France stage wins and it's one of the most talked-about and photographed bikes of the WorldTour – and today Canyon has officially released all the details and the numbers. We talked exclusively to lead engineer Lukas Birr, questioning him in more depth not only about how Canyon made the fourth generation Aeroad faster than its rivals – and of course lighter than its predecessor – but also which aspect of the new bike he’s personally proudest of.
First up, the figures. An aero bike has to be about saving watts, and Canyon says the new Aeroad is the fastest bike in the peloton: 2.5 watts faster than the Cervélo S5, which is the next fastest in its wind tunnel testing. The brand doesn’t give a precise number for the improvement over the previous Aeroad – it’s becoming common practice to supply a graph showing comparative wind tunnel performances over a yaw sweep of -20 to +20 degrees at 45kph. From this we extrapolate that the new bike is on average 1.5-2 watts faster than the outgoing one. How did Canyon achieve this?
“The fork has the most influence on the aero gains,” says Birr. “We had quite an increase in drag at the rear end of the bike because we slimmed it down so much. So we had to make up for that by redesigning the fork crown and then most notably we have an hourglass shaped head tube and a narrower down tube.”
Why is the rear triangle slimmer – presumably to save weight? “No,” says Birr, “the rear triangle is slimmer because it was more about what Mathieu wanted. He was the biggest proponent of getting more direct feedback from the road. The first iteration of the current Aeroad was too comfortable for him. He’s such a precise rider that he needs the feedback from the rear. But we realised that it could have been quite a harsh ride. We know that comfort nowadays is mostly generated by the tyres but nonetheless we wanted to strike a good compromise between some sort of comfort and the directness of feedback from the rear triangle.”
At the same time Canyon redesigned the seatpost. It no longer features the same truncated design as the last generation, which in 2021 caused wear issues before a fix was rolled out, and it has more flex engineered in.
“It’s not as deep and doesn’t have that internal section that’s cut away,” confirms Birr. “An aero seatpost doesn’t have a very comfortable shape, it has a very high modulus of resistance due to the sheer cross section of it. So we decided to cut it at the rear to get a little bit more deflection out of it. We also changed the geometry of the attachment point from the seatstays to the seat tube. Many people suspected aero, but in fact this was was to smooth out the peak loads on the laminate for a bit more comfort.”
Moving to the front of the bike, the new Aeroad features Canyon’s new Pace Bar system replaces the CP0018 adjustable cockpit. Pace stands for 'performance adaptive cockpit ecosystem'. The new cockpit goes one better – or rather two better – than the previous version. It has interchangeable drops, both sets of which come with the bike, in ‘classic’ or ‘aero’. These can be swapped without disconnecting the brake lines (though bar tape would have to be rewrapped). The classic drops have minimal flare with a conventional shape, while the aero drops are 20mm closer at the hoods than at the drops and have a longer reach. For a rider using the aero drops, Canyon claims a massive 14-watt saving is possible.
Birr explains: “With the shape of the bars and how the STIs are positioned we can fine-tune ergonomics, fine-tune rider position by increasing reach, decreasing width… We’ve seen Alpecin using both versions in the Tour de France. For pulling on the front of the peloton the aero drops go narrow and you get a bit more into a bullet shape. We averaged about 14 watts of drag saving in this position. It’s not for a sprinter, not for fighting for position in the peloton, but if you sit up front and pull – the Pace Bar system allows us to do this.”
Next up, the weight. Canyon says the new frame at 960g is lighter than the previous Aeroad that the pro teams were on (though not lighter than the 915g Aeroad CFR – which it turns out Van der Poel et al were not riding). This seems like an even smaller saving than the 1.5-2 watts of the frame?
“You can always go lighter, you can always go faster,” says Birr. For faster, there’s physics but for lighter there’s an additional requirement for a frame to be robust. I’ve seen images of competitor bikes in crashes falling into multiple pieces and I don’t want to see that. [The Aeroad] is supposed to survive Arenberg without any problems, crashes without any problems but that also imposes certain limits on how far we can push the weight decrease.”
And finally, which aspect of the new Aeroad’s design and development is Birr most proud of?
“What I am most proud of is that this bike has already won three stages of the Tour de France. But then when it comes to the product, I always joke but I do mean it – I’m very proud of the bolts. It was a lot of fun to develop them with a German company, going back to the beginning and asking, what do you want from a bolt?” The new Aeroad uses Torx 25 for all adjustments of the frameset, cockpit and seatpost. Canyon says it chose Torx over Allen bolts due to reduced risk of rounding the screw through more positive, secure engagement. The cockpit features all titanium screws for corrosion resistance.
“Also I’m proud of the production process,” continues Birr. “We switched to a new process with a new type of mandrel that the pre-preg is wrapped around, and I’m proud of the way we worked on being able to manufacture this bike with an incredible increase in production stability and quality. We’re not going to market this, but the laminate we developed is very, very repeatable. What we deliver to the customer is unprecedented in terms of quality. What we claim is it’s cobble ready, tough, robust and this is the result of that process.”
And finally, the question everybody is asking: will Canyon merge the Aeroad and the lightweight Ultimate, like Trek has done with the Madone and the Emonda?
“No,” answers Birr. “The Ultimate does now have a niche use case in pro sport but it’s being used, mostly by our female athletes but even with a very conservative team like Alpecin, it’s a fast team but there’s one or two guys on the Ultimate there too. So we will not merge them and kill one of them because we do see a use case for both.”
The new Aeroad line-up comprises six models across two platforms. Both the Aeroad CF SLX and flagship Aeroad CFR platforms include integrated power meters and exclusively electronic groupsets. The CFR (Canyon Factory Racing) is made from a superior carbon resulting in a lighter frameset, a claimed 2,070g and 7.07kg as a complete bike in the top spec. Canyon has dropped the Aeroad CF SL, saying: “We’ve taken our performance engineering approach to a whole new level. The CF SLX and CFR platforms are the embodiment of this approach.” Pricing is competitive, with the top Aeroad CFR AXS priced at £9,749 and the Aeroad CFR Di2 £9,299. The Aeroad CF SLX starts at £3,949 for the SRAM Rival AXS equipped bike. Go to Canyon’s website for more information and pricing.
We have an Aeroad CFR Di2 on loan – keep an eye out for our full review.
