If you’ve not been under a rock, you’d know that 3T brought single chainring 1x to the road racing peloton with their sponsorship of the Aqua Blue team and their Strada fat tire aero road bike. But you would probably also know that there was huge pushback from amateurs and pros alike, not ready to give up the proper range and smooth gearing steps of a road double. Well in a word, 3T has caved in and has a new 3T Strada Due with a front derailleur hanger.
3T Strada Due double chainring aero road bike
Last year 3T debuted the Strada optimized for aero benefits even with big 30mm tires, but limited to 1x drivetrains, which although aero & efficient also limited gearing selection. Now that bike gets more real world race-ability as the 3T Strada Due (pronounced Doo-eh, which is Italian for “two”) thanks to the addition of a braze-on style front derailleur hanger (that was spotted on a few team bikes earlier in development) and electronic-only cable routing.
3T says the 1x drivetrain choice was “a bit controversial”, which is a bit of an understatement, but still something they believe in for a wide tire aerodynamically optimized road bike. It does save a claimed 8W in aero drag and 300g in weight reduction over the double chainring setups. The 1x Stradas (in Team & Pro variants) aren’t going away, they just get a 2x sibling more suited to racing in the mountains.
They also admit that launching with a 1x road bike was an easier way to get attention. But truth be told there are still plenty of races where their Aqua Blue Sport pro cycling team needed the extra range and gearing that a traditional 2x drivetrain offers.
Tech Details
The new Strada Due is a team-level carbon bike with 3T’s second-tier premium carbon fiber layup. (No LTD version is offered for the Strada yet.) That also gives the frameset (frame, fork, headset & seatpost, plus thru-axles and foam sleeves for the rear brake hose) a 3800€ price tag in its primer gray only paint job, and five size range (XS-XL). That smallest XS is actually a new size that carries over to the 1x bikes as well.
The Due gets a slight change to the layup to handle the load of the front derailleur, but the molds are the same as the 1x. That adds about 35g in total, between the additional material and the mount. Claimed frame weight is 1005g (+/-3%). The complete bike will be about 250-350g heavier by the time you add the extra shifter, wires, and derailleur, though.
It features all of the same Sqaero aero tech optimized around 30mm tires, with flat mount disc brakes, 12mm thru-axles, and the asymmetric Fundo fork that smoothly transitions into the frame & the disc brake mount.
It features bump absorbing, thinner seatstays (plus those high-volume tires don’t hurt) and multiple water bottle positions tucked in behind the oversized aerofoil downtube. Adding a front derailleur adds versatility, but it’ll need to be Di2, EPS, or eTap as the bike only has internal electronic routing.
Single chainring road isn’t going anywhere – 3T called it as what road bikes will look like in 5 years – so just 4 more years to go. Until then, feel free to hop on a road double with the new 3T Strada Due, available by the end of July 2018. And ride the same bike that Team Aqua Blue will add to their quiver for steeper races like this weekend’s Tour of Austria (even though they won the King of the Mountain competition in last month’s Tour de Suisse on the 1x bike thanks to careful chainring selection.)
