The new Trek Emonda SLR: The lightest yet

When Trek launched the Emonda in 2014, just a few days before the Tour de France kicked off in Yorkshire, its range topping Trek Emonda SLR upped the ante in the weight race for production road bikes. Its 690g frame meant Trek achieved a fuselage weight (frame and forks) under 1kg and boasted the lightest production bike at that time.

Three years on, Trek has gone all out to see if it could better its own benchmark and as you might expect, there’s now a disc brake option too.

Let’s cut straight to it… At 660g the latest Trek Emonda SLR disc frame is unfathomably light, lighter even than the previous calliper brake frame.

It was only a few years ago that getting to such a feathery low weight would have meant a trip to Cervelo’s California project (and around an £8000 dent in your wallet for the privilege).

The calliper brake Trek Emonda SLR cuts the disc frame figure a further 20g to 640g, breaking the 650g mark for the first time in a production setting (The eagle eyed amongst you may have already spotted one of these being used by Alberto Contador).

That’s also very impressive, but the fact a disc brake frame no longer seems to carry significant weight penalty, and could easily achieve a complete build well below the UCI’s 6.8kg limit, will likely be the bigger talking point.

For reference these weights are quoted as being for a 56cm frame, painted with U5 vapour coat (Trek’s minimalist 5g paint finish).

‘The new Emonda is not just a simple case of making the lightest lighter,’ says Trek’s Director of Road, Ben Coates, keen to stress there’s more to this story than just shaving off a chunk of grams.

‘These bikes still had to be Treks - which means they still have to ride incredibly well and still have a lifetime warranty etc.

'We knew that we had to satisfy the disc brake market. Not for the pros, that’s still probably the most controversial topic in pro road racing right now, but for our customers who appreciate having super lightweight with race geometry and ride quality to match, we felt we needed to offer them the choice.’

Trek’s claim then is not only is the new Emonda SLR lighter, it’s stiffer and more compliant, this improving the ride quality at a lower weight.

It’s not the first time we’ve heard that old record spun, but Coates goes on to explain how the OCLV 700 carbon of today is far from the same as OCLV 700 of a few years ago.

‘We constantly evolve it, finding new fibres and ways to improve the laminate schedule and the carbon fibre pieces are always getting smaller and more precise – optimised for the jobs they have to do.

'For this new bike we changed absolutely everything and made improvements across the board. It was a ground-up new start.’

This process begins with tens of thousands of iterations running through computer modelling software.

That’s nothing particularly ground-breaking in itself, it’s how most manufacturers make their decisions these days, but the point of difference at Trek, according to Coates, is the number of times it goes back through this cycle in combination with real world prototype testing.

‘The math tells you only so much. But we can take this to the next step to 3D model what it would look like out on the road.

'But even then we still have to take what appear to be the best options for real-world testing. Then we go back to the science and the numbers with the ones that tested the best to try and see how we can improve on it further.

'That’s our cycle.’

The frame will still appeal to those who like traditional road styling, as Trek has kept the style changes subtle compared to the previous Emonda, with both H1 and H2 fit options (H1 has a racier fit with a lower front end – H2 is taller at the front for a slightly more relaxed position) available in both rim and disc options.

The Trek Emonda SLR features Bontrager’s new, sub 100g Speedstop Pro direct mount brakes, and is entirely carbon frame, including details like the derailleur mounts.

The SLR Disc uses co-moulded aluminium drop outs (accounting for the additional frame weight) for the threaded portion required for the thru-axles.

Putting the SLR aside for a moment, one of the most exciting things about this new launch is at the opposite end of the pricing spectrum.

Realising that the market for top of the line SLRs is limited to those with fairly deep pockets, Trek has also brought out new models lower down the range.

The standout bike seems to be the Emonda SL (essentially the same frame as the current Emonda SLR, but using a slightly cheaper updated laminate) retaining a lot of the features of the top end bikes – direct mount brakes, internal cabling, ride tuned seat mast etc. with a claimed frame weight of 1000g.

Pricing with a full Shimano 105 groupset is impressive at $1700 (£1300). Again there’s a disc option at this level too.

Trek Emonda SL: Pricing

Trek Emonda SLR: Top of the range

Trek Emonda SLR from £4000 for the SLR 6
Trek Emonda SLR Disc from £4400

Trek Emonda SLR 9 (top of the range) - £8500
Trek Emonda SLR 8 Disc - £6000

Trek Emonda SL: Entry level

SL prices start at £1500 (SL 4 rim brake), and the cheapest disc model is the SL 6 Disc at £2650

Trek Emonda SLR 2015 review

The lightest weight production bike ever made also happens to be one of the best. The Emonda SLR has shot straight into our top three

Trek already has two race-winning road bikes in its line-up – the aero-tuned Madone and the cobble-slaying Domane – so when the Wisconsin-based company announced it was launching a completely new road platform, it was hard to fathom where it might go next. In the end when they produced the Emonda SLR, they took on one of the oldest and fiercest battles in bike building – simply to be the lightest.

Frame

The goal for the engineers was straightforward – elevate Trek to the top of the weight race with the lightest production road bike in the world (and then create another bike name using the same six letters as the Madone and Domane).

It’s important to make a distinction here between lightest ‘frame’ and lightest ‘production bike’. The Emonda frame has a claimed weight of 690g for a painted 56cm, so can’t lay claim to being the skimpiest out there (although it’s not far off). However, what Trek has done is taken a holistic approach to the entire build, to arrive at a staggering 4.6kg (10.2lb) complete bike weight for its range-topping SLR 10 model, enough to crown it as the lightest production model on the planet.

You could argue that’s a slightly hollow victory, because at this price point – the SLR 10 costs £11,000 – who goes for ‘production’ anyway? And as soon as you start thinking outside the box for spec choices, the weight can soon come off practically any production bike. But, as they say, a win’s a win. What’s crucial, however, is that Trek has done more than just make one superlight flagship. It has created an entire range, using the same exhaustive approach to each model to achieve ‘best in class’ weight and specification at every level.

Our test bike is a custom spec, based around the top SLR 700 series OCLV frameset, and includes a Dura-Ace 9000 mechanical groupset (with direct mount brakes front and rear), Bontrager Aelous 3 D3 wheelset and the all-new Bontrager XXX integrated bar stem, showcasing all of the new technologies Trek has on offer. You can buy the very same bike through Trek’s Project One programme – complete with highly attractive (in our opinion anyway) powder blue paint colour, and it would set you back £7,080. That puts it squarely between two off-the-shelf models – the Shimano Dura-Ace 9070 Di2 equipped SLR 9 at £7,899 and the Dura-Ace 9000 specced SLR 8 at £5,800.

Weight

It graced our scales at 6.2kg, more than half a kilo under the allowable weight limit for pro bikes. ‘All you have to do is pick it up to understand what [the Emonda concept] is about,’ says Trek’s road product manager Ben Coates. ‘For the consumer, weight is very quantifiable, both when you lift it and when you ride it. Everyone wants lightweight. The person who spends £1,500 wants lightweight, just like the guy that spends £15,000. The benefits are there across the board. It is a quantifiable benefit that every [level of] rider will appreciate.’ Crucially though, Coates adds, ‘Superlight only plays when it rides super great.’ Which sounds like our cue to take the Emonda for a spin.

Power to weight

I have to agree with Coates. A lighter bike (assuming it has good build quality) adds a tangible and instantly gratifying element to the ride experience. Sure, it’s a plus if your bike handles smoothly, and some aerodynamic profiling is always a bonus as well, but I believe there’s more currency in something that accelerates effortlessly and makes you feel like a superstar uphill. Let’s face it, hills are where most of us gauge our performances, and climbing prowess is for the most part about power versus weight. And Coates is right about the shop floor point too. Picking a bike up is the first thing (OK, maybe the second thing – after squeezing the brakes repeatedly) that customers do.

Shedding weight from a frame is always a case of striking a balance, trimming grams where it won’t affect the ride quality and optimising lay-ups so that every single strand of carbon serves a purpose. Trek appears to have got the mix spot on with the Emonda. It didn’t take long to impress me. On my very first ride – which happened to be a large chunk of stage one of the 2014 Tour De France – I felt immediately at one with the Emonda. I’d describe the feeling as riding 

‘in’ the bike rather than ‘on’ it, something that for a micro-adjuster like myself usually takes a fair amount
of time and fettling to get right.

The ride

The rolling Yorkshire landscape, and the Buttertubs Pass in particular, were early opportunities for the Emonda to show what it was capable of. It seemed to gain, and hold on to, speed with ease on the undulating lanes, in or out of the saddle, but pointing it up the bigger climbs was where it really showed its true colours. It’s a beautiful sensation when a bike feels like it’s genuinely making a climb easier for you. The Emonda showed no signs of being flappable under even my most aggressive hill efforts, and with such low weight it was like having a few extra watts on tap. I wondered, a few days later, as I watched Jens Voigt on TV powering over the Buttertubs on his Emonda at the head of the Tour de France, whether he too was thankful for its benefits.

I’ve since travelled to Italy, and all over my regular Dorset stomping grounds with the Émonda, and not once have I come back disappointed. It’s a dream to ride uphill, and it carries on delivering over the top and down the other side. I haven’t, in over two months of testing, found a chink in the Émonda’s armour. The Bontrager Aeolus 3 D3 wheels are a superb complement to the bike – light and stiff enough to accelerate quickly when you lay down the power. The only glitch is the supplied cork brake pads’ performance in the wet, which left me white-knuckle braking in the Dolomites in a heavy downpour. But that’s an easy and inexpensive fix.

There is a lot more to a great bike than just being light, but when the rest of the aspects are as good as on the Emonda, then it’s always going to be hard to dismiss weight as a deciding factor in a bike’s performance. I’ll genuinely miss it once this review is published and the bike is returned, and I’m already pondering how to reconfigure my all-time top three, to give it a well-deserving place.

For

The best climbers bike we've ever ridden

Against

Poor brake pads

Geometry

Spec