In our last gallery of bikes from the 2016 Paris-Nice road bike race, we find Russian team Katusha’s Canyon road bikes running spec that’s mostly available to the rest of us, and stuff we’ve seen on their bikes before. The one team-only bit of spec are the Continental ProLTD tubulars, a popular item in the peloton.
The SRAM eTAP group’s new matte-with-gloss look matches the frame’s matte-and-gloss red paint scheme well. Thankfully, that group’s aesthetics have shifted to the mechanical RED group, too. Check out a closeup of Katusha team member blanks bike here. Click through for more…
The Dutch Lotto Jumbo team mostly ran Bianchi’s aero road bike, the Oltre XR, though we spotted a few Specialissimas in the queue as well.
The bike’s main tubes on the entire front half of the bike are shaped to cheat the wind, but do so without looking out of place (they are Italian, after all).
Vittoria calls their new Corsa “the world’s best tire” thanks to its use of Graphene to simultaneously improve grip and durability while reducing rolling resistance. It was introduced last fall, and we tested it briefly, but Lotto Jumbo was already fully on board (we saw them on another team’s bikes, too). These guys were running 25mm wide tires to smooth things out.
The Di2/EPS wire port is a little far forward, so a zip tie keeps it from contacting the heels.
Orica-GreenEDGE’s Scott Foil aero road bikes were also pretty much stock.
Carbs or no carbs, bottles are easily identifiable via markings on the caps.
Custom number mounts took different forms – one integrated into the seatpost clamp, the other bonded onto the post itself.
Tinkoff Saxo’s Specialized bikes were also fairly straightforward and like many bikes had CeramicSpeed upgrades…except here, those bearings come stock with the Roval CLX60 tubulars.
They were running the stock Specialized 700×24 Allround tubulars, not the prototype 28’s we spotted on Adam Blythe’s Venge at Tour Down Under.