KTM bikes had tended to focus quite heavily on off-road and we saw their new superlight XC bikes when they were unveiled earlier in the summer. But the Austrian manufacturer has been growing out of their mountain and city bike mold for a while now, and has already developed a good looking carbon road race bike and its disc brake endurance cousin. But it looks like KTM is putting a lot of effort onto the road with this new sleek-looking Lisse aero road bike project. Being a title sponsor for a French Pro Continental team, they’ve also released some team replica editions of their Revelator. And with the UCI set to reintroduce disc trial they’ve hinted that a disc brake version of the bike keeping the race geometry may be on the way…
Still officially a concept bike, the Lisse is all about pairing aero frame and fork shapes with neat & full integration. The bike gets aero focused tube shaping throughout, but instead of the aerofoil and Kamm tail shapes we always see, the KTM seems to have interpreted those designs with some sharper edges thrown in. For example the aero bb shape is designed more to cut into the wind, to move air past the spinning cranks, more than a standard airfoil. The bike gets integrated fork designs that combine an aero brake layout, angular straight legs, and a wide-set fork crown which flows directly into the sharp-edged aerofoil downtube. Up front the cockpit is held together by an aero stem system, with cable routing through the upper part of the stem clamp, and integrated aero steerer tube spacers.
The Lissie uses a narrow aero shaped seatpost with a blunt tail said to boost comfort, that is then combined with a smoothly integrated clamp at the frame (tightened with an expander from inside the main triangle) and a thin 2-bolt clamp at the saddle rails. The bike also uses a unique combination of a deep rear wheel cutout that supports a dropped seatstay bridge with wide-spaced, squared off stays to limit the frontal area of the rear part of the bike and smoothly move air over the rear wheel. Attaching the wheels are an integrated aero thru axle setup that makes for a clean finish to the wind, but can also be swapped out for regular QRs.
No word yet on when the bike will make it to market, but KTM was adamant about working within the UCI guidelines, so we’ll look for it under their Pro Conti team next season.
On the current road race side, the Revelator Prestige bike that the Marseille 13-KTM (now Delko–Marseille Provence KTM) professional continental team races gets offered to customers in a M13 replica paint job and three specs. The top replica bike gets spec’ed with eTap and DT Swiss RC38 carbon clinchers to sell for 6600€ with a claimed weight of 6.85kg as it is race by the team. A more affordable Revelator M13 Red sticks with the mechanical group and alloy Mavic wheels to drop the price down to 4000€ while only adding a claimed 150g. Even more attainable, you can get the M13 replica look with a Force 22 compact for 2400€ and a claimed 7.56kg.
Now the last thing we saw was a mock-up of a disc brake Revelator in the M13 paint. It was clearly shown to be just a placeholder for the M13 replica paint job but raised the question of when a race geometry disc brake Revelator would be available. With discs set to try again in the pro peloton next year, KTM’s pro conti team won’t want to race on the more slack geometry that comes with their endurance Revelator Sky, so we should expect to see the steeper 73° head/75° seat angle Revelator Prestige get a disc upgrade for the coming race season.
