The original Concept project started in 1986. ‘It was incredibly clever, designed and engineered with Ferrari,’ says Colnago’s Davide Fumagalli.
‘It was carbon tubed, carbon lugged with carbon dropouts, press-fit bottom bracket, internal cable routing, hydraulic rim brakes, carbon wheels and an internal, sealed gearbox – way ahead of its time.
‘But it was too heavy for the market and it wasn’t stiff enough nor strong enough for the Colnago standard, and it was very expensive.’
Fumagalli, Colnago’s design engineer, cites the seven-speed gearbox – housed in the crankset spider and operable via a mini gearstick in the down tube – as contributing a whopping 5.3kg to the overall 13kg weight.
It also helped the bike cost three times the price of Colnago’s most expensive bike of the day and, in Fumagalli’s words, it ‘nearly bankrupted the company’.
Still, while subsequent bikes have borne little resemblance to the Concept, there’s no doubt Colnago’s first true foray into aero-road, the Concept ‘2.0’, has a lot to thank the proud yet flawed original for. Starting, of all places, with the headset.
Real race bikes
Fumagalli says he and his team have gone to great lengths to ensure the Concept fits the Colnago philosophy, which is to make ‘real race bikes’.
As such, ride quality was as much a part of the design brief as aerodynamics, which led Fumagalli to reimagine a crucial yet oft overlooked area of the bike.
‘The headset is the part that makes me most proud. The bearings have a degree of liberty to “float” inside the bearing cups, which have been designed with a toothed profile and moulded from a carbon-reinforced polymer first developed for the 1986 Concept.’
This system doesn’t operate like the suspension on the Specialized Roubaix or the damping on the Trek Domane, but Fumagalli says its design, together with a special lamination process in the fork steerer, helps smooth out road vibrations, thereby providing more accurate rider feedback as the distortion due to vibration is effectively filtered out.
Some 41
Yet this is still firstly an aero bike, and Colnago says it went through 41 iterations to fine-tune the aerodynamics.
Aero-philes will be pleased to know these models spent time in the Politecnico di Milano wind-tunnel, as well as on the computer screens at the hands of CFD technicians; Nago-philes might be interested to note that the gearbox on the 1986 Concept was the first time Colnago had ever used a computer to design a part.
Fumagalli is coy about comparing aero data to other brands, simply saying Colnago ‘decided not to share it’, but he was forthcoming at the bike’s launch in saying the Concept saved 20 watts over the C60 with a medium rider aboard at 50kmh, and 4 watts over the V1-r.
Beyond the aerofoil-style tube profiles it employs three neat tricks to achieve these results.
First, the down tube thickens towards the bottom bracket to help push air up and around a water bottle; second, there’s a large recess behind the fork crown to better accommodate turbulent air from the front wheel; and third, Colnago changes the shape of the rear end based on frame size to maintain aero properties.
A size small, for example, will have seatstays that butt the seat tube higher up than on a medium, and large frames have a bigger gap around the top of the seatstays, which it’s said does a similar job as the recess behind the fork crown.
Simple yet sophisticated
Where many other aero bikes pursue integration at all costs, Colnago has kept things simple.
A regular stem and bar can be fitted (although a Concept-dedicated stem will be available), cable routing is internal but not completely hidden away, and the rear brake calliper is in the usual place, as opposed to beneath the chainstays as on the V1-r.
‘That brake was performing well when properly installed, but it had downsides,’ says Fumagalli. ‘Clearance for some power meters was a problem, as well as rear wheel changing.’
‘The Concept’s direct-mount brakes help it to accept tyres up to 28mm, a sign of the times for a brand whose flagship C60 can only accommodate 23mm tyres in most tyre/wheel combos.
In fact, for a brand almost as famous for its idiosyncrasies as its pedigree, the Concept appears to be a thoroughly well thought out bike with cross-company collaboration. This Art Décor paintjob was even designed by Ernesto himself.
Yet there is still one little foible: the indentation in the back of the seatpost.
‘It was intended to be an attachment point for a light system, but I was late with that feature in the end,’ laughs Fumagalli.
‘Now it’s just a “to-do” reminder!’
Verdict: The Concept is back, but in creating the Concept 2.0 Colnago has made a premium aero road beauty for the real world.
