Colnago has two very distinct streams of bikes as of late. There’s the ‘Mannequin V’, at the moment confined to the Colnago V4Rs, and designed to be the manufacturers pinnacle of efficiency; Aero, light-weight, the works. Colnago additionally has a useful temper board for the Mannequin V, crammed with sensors, knowledge, Audis, bike races, turbo trainers and quite a lot of black equipment.
Then you might have the ‘C Collection’, which covers the Colnago C68, the C68 Titanium, the C68 Allroad, and now the C68 Gravel. The temper board for this stream could be very completely different. There’s dusty roads, sunsets, convertible Ferraris, wooden, wealthy tans, pink fits, and above all, heritage.
The model’s C Collection fashions are nonetheless made in Italy utilizing carbon tubes bonded into carbon (and sometimes titanium) lugs. If you’d like a flavour of what this seems like I frolicked behind the scenes on the Colnago manufacturing unit final yr, so you may fill your boots. The brand new C68 Gravel extends the vary to cowl something from pure street, to thoroughly off-road using, while nonetheless, if the temper boards are to be believed, sustaining that intangible heritage issue that its clients so crave.
What’s new? Effectively, primarily that comes all the way down to geometry.
The black sheep of the vary
The geometrical variations between the C Collection fashions are minimal for essentially the most half. The C68 and C68 Titanium solely differ in materials phrases, the latter utilizing the occasional titanium lug. The C68 Allroad affords elevated tyre clearances to mean you can cope with poor high quality tarmac and ‘mild gravel’, however retains the angles successfully equivalent; it’s nonetheless a street bike at coronary heart, even when Colnago’s geometry is just a little longer and slacker than the norm.
The C68 Gravel although is shorter within the attain and better within the stack than the remainder of the vary, in order to supply higher management and luxury off street. It’s also marginally longer than the model’s present gravel providing, the G3-X, permitting a shorter stem to be fitted.
The construct
All of the construct choices are, as is changing into more and more commonplace, 1x solely. You can not put a entrance derailleur on the C68 Gravel, however you may match tyres as much as 45mm. The PR materials we’ve obtained additionally reveals a CAD drawing of a 64mm hole within the forks and a 55mm hole on the chainstays, and the precise tyre clearance will even rely upon components like inside rim width and the way knobbly you’re going.
Up entrance you’ll be getting a large, flared model of the CC01 built-in cockpit that options on different Colnago fashions. The width of this bar is a typical 40cm on the tops and 46cm on the base, however the stem size varies from 80mm to 120mm in 10mm increments. The bar you get will rely upon the scale of body you go together with, and there are 5 of these to select from. You possibly can match any bar of your selecting as an aftermarket choice, in line with Colnago, supplied it’s an internally routed system.
Color decisions are restricted to both a black or a inexperienced stable scheme, with the black being very paying homage to the Colnago C35 that I photographed as a part of eleven historic bikes from the Colnago archive.
The whole builds are available in three flavours, these being a Shimano GRX groupset coupled with Fulcrum Fast Crimson wheels (€7,250), a SRAM Crimson XPLR x Zipp 303S setup (€12,010), or a SRAM Drive XPLR construct with Fulcrum Fast Crimson wheels (€8,960). All choices ship with 40mm Pirelli Cinturato tyres. If you wish to do your individual factor then a frameset in both color will set you again €5,935.
International pricing is but to be forthcoming, however we expect a check bike shortly for overview, so you should definitely test again in for that.
