On Thursday, Colnago announced that the first development phase completed on their new “Prototipo,” frame, and that testing will now proceed directly on-field. Beginning this weekend, UAE Team Emirates riders will have another bike option in races: the Colnago Prototipo. In addition to the Colnago V3Rs, riders from Tadej Pogacar’s team can choose to ride the Prototipo even though it’s still under development and before it’s available on the open market.
The project has involved a completely new method of construction. In the first phase, the lamination (the thickness and placement of the carbon fiber) of some parts of the Prototipo, a monocoque frame bike, was tested by Colnago on the parts that make up the new C series frame. This was made up of modular parts and not monocoque. Being able to work on parts of a frame instead of a complete frame, as you would traditionally for a monocoque design, provided the company with the opportunity to study different laminations of the carbon tubes with a much more agile and verifiable sequence in a shorter timeframe; in other words, Colnago could receive much more accurate results as fast as possible.
After testing numerous options, five final “test” stiffness matrices that led to five different laminations were selected for the monocoque frames to be ridden on-field. And it’s this quintet of Prototipo prototypes that will be available for the team to race on starting from tomorrow. From these five different laminations, Colnago will arrive at the final version that will be sold in the future. The only way to enjoy perfect and clean feedback is to make real “race-ready” bikes available to their riders and encourage them to use them as hard as possible during competition.
“To improve the performance of this frame we used a totally new method – that is to collaborate directly with the UAE Team Emirates athletes, proposing to race with frames produced with different carbon laminations. The ultimate goal is to achieve the best lamination for a frame that must be as versatile as possible, suited to the needs of sprinters, rouleurs and climbers alike, and to be at the top in the different phases of a race,” Davide Fumagalli, Colnago Head of R&D said. “While computer and wind-tunnel tests are important, they have limitations. It is difficult–if not impossible–to replicate the race-specific situations, the irregularities of the course, the stresses of the terrain, the aerodynamic turbulence, the accelerations in the different moments of the competition. At the level of development we have reached, it is becoming increasingly difficult to achieve improvements. In this way, by taking advantage of the experience of those who ride their bicycles for many hours a day, we feel we can make our racing bikes take a further and important step forward.”
From a design point of view, the key points in the development of the Colnago Prototipo are the thin and hollowed head tube with deep and marked veins, in addition to the larger and more robust bottom-bracket area.
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