Cervelo has always been a company of few bikes. By our reckoning, the R-series was the last major road range launch back in 2005 and it’s just been incremental model updates ever since. Now though it appears that Cervelo is ready to launch something completely new and we’ve got a feeling it’s a gravel bike.
Cervelo has released three videos titled ‘Meet the Test Rider’ in which it asks a couple of riders to test its new bike. Cervelo describes the bike as ‘radically new’ so here’s what we know from the two videos.
Thanks to an over exuberant Cervelo dealer in Germany, we know the new model to be the ‘C’ and the C3 will be available in an Ultegra build priced at €4,999 (UK pricing yet to be announced).
We've also found sneaky pictures taken from the Cervelo catalogue showing there will be a C3 and C5 models: Cervelo 2016 catalogue
We can clearly see from these images that the new C range will have bowed seat-stays presumably to increase the rear end comfort of the frame. It's possible, based on the tag lines, that the new C range may just be endurance bikes, rather than specific gravel bikes.
Tyre clearance and disc brakes
First up the fork appears to have lots of clearance around what looks like a large volume 30mm tyre. Marco’s video clearly takes in gravel roads and he describes it as still being as stiff as a regular road bike, particularly in the head tube.
The bike is also fitted with Shimano’s new RS805 FlatMount disc brakes with 140mm rotors. We’ve already seen glimpses of an R3 fitted with discs for the pros to race at WorldTour level so it’s no surprise to see them fitted to this new gravel bike.
This is all the information we have for now, but Cervelo has announced it will release the full details of the bike on the 15th of December. We’ll update this article with more information when we receive it.