The biggest bit of news at the Critérium du Dauphiné at the weekend - along with Tadej Pogačar effectively winning a bunch sprint - was the surprise emergence of a new Factor aero bike.
Just over a year ago, I interviewed Factor CEO Rob Gitelis for a magazine feature about aerodynamics, and whether or not we were coming to the end of the road regarding big aero gains in the bike industry, as all bikes at this time were beginning to look very, for want of a better word, ‘samey’.
Gitelis giggled and told me, “I can assure you that the next bike that we are currently working on will be significantly faster than the Ostro VAM.”
What he didn’t tell me, is that it would look like the type of bike we are far more used to seeing within the confines of a velodrome, rather than on the road.
Well, it looks like it could be here - what ever ‘it’ is because we don’t have a name for it yet - and it’s just made its debut under Jake Stewart at the Critérium du Dauphiné - who finished fifth on Sunday. Not with a slick press release or carefully stage-managed video reveal, but in the wild, raw-carbon and all, under a rider clearly testing the limits of what's permitted.
Most new bikes arrive with leaks, rumours and forum sleuthing. Not this one. Stewart rolled out aboard it without warning. Whether that signals a full release in time for the Tour de France remains to be seen - but judging by the sheer audacity of the design, it’s not a bike that wants to stay in the shadows.
Track bike front end
Let’s start at the front, where bike design in general seems to be getting ever more wild. The bike borrows heavily from Factor’s Hanzo time trial rig, particularly in the front-end silhouette. It features an extremely deep bayonet-style fork - one of the most striking in the peloton - which doesn’t pass through the head tube but rather sits in front of it. Just like the Cervélo S5, and the Colnago Y1RS, this helps elongate the headtube further, increasing efficiency. The fork legs themselves are aggressively wide-set and knife-thin in depth.
This concept was first popularised on the track by bikes such as the Hope HB.T track bike, and the Look P24 (funnily named so as not to steal the name of the Paris 24 Olympics). The idea is that by having wide fork legs, you can deal with the airflow around that component, in greater isolation. This is something that has not been seen on the road in quite such a wild, and high profile fashion until now.
Stewart’s setup included a bar-stem combo with a Y-shaped layout that draws easy comparisons to Colnago’s Y1Rs - tall twin struts rising upward from the fork crown with no central connecting strut, unlike the Cervélo S5.
A familiar rear triangle
The rear triangle doesn’t let up either, and everything continues to be more extreme. Further dropped seat stays, a near-vertical seat post, and a deeply scalloped seat tube - a setup, once again that brings to mind the S5.
Naturally, it’s finished with Factor’s in-house Black Inc 62mm wheels and Continental GP5000 TT tyres - a full-on watt-chaser’s spec sheet. And with no paint and seemingly very little interest in weight reduction beyond what’s necessary, you’d expect this prototype to nudge the UCI minimum without needing ballast.
So, what are we looking at here? A bold new aero flagship? A development mule for something deeper in the pipeline? Or just a glorified skunkworks experiment that happened to get a start at the Dauphiné? We asked Factor for clarification on the new bike - however, it declined to comment at this stage.
Time - and probably the Tour - will tell. But one thing’s for certain - Rob Gitelis wasn’t joking. The next Factor really does look faster. And judging by what we’ve seen so far, it’s also a lot weirder - in the best possible way.
