With a new season, another World Champion’s jersey, and a new team, showman Peter Sagan will stand out in the peloton this year on an incredibly shiny Specialized Venge. A couple of weeks ago we saw Specialized give the Women’s road Champ her own trick S-Works Amira, and with Sagan there’ll be another rainbow themed S-Works rolling around. Wheelie past the break to get a close up look at his chromed out Venge, plus a video of Sagan showing a new method to bed in the cables, chain & brakes on his road bikes…
During most of the training camp in Spain with his new Bora-Hansgrohe team, the Slovak World Champ was riding on standard team livery bikes. He did get a present though, his own rainbow paint job for another season of racing. Like Amalie Dideriksen’s bike that we saw back in December, this custom painted S-Works Venge is at the same time subtle and ostentatious.
In a dimly lit room, the bike essentially shares the same simple dark paint job that the rest of the Bora-Hansgrohe team rides (left), with just a hand full of low-key logos. But shine a bit of light on the bike and a reflective rainbow of colors refracts back (right). We’re actually quite curious to see what the bike looks like in the bright sun of the race season, starting soon with the Tour Down Under.
The bike is actually the second generation of the concept. A first sample previewed for Sagan back in November needed a bit of an adjustment to make him happy, but now that it’s done, the Champ is looking forward to racing the flashy bike.
The design idea was about reflecting Sagan’s growth and maturity after a year on the top of the world stage in the rainbow strips. But his flashiness isn’t expected to go away anytime soon. So no rainbow stripes on it besides Sagan’s name on the toptube, but the new prismatic paint that lead Specialized road designer Ron Jones figured out gives “a ton of depth to the paint”.
The Venge ViAS itself is unchanged from the colorful bike that Sagan rode with Tinkoff last season, as he was said to have brought most of his sponsors with him to his new team. I guess when you win two World Championships in a row, there is not much of a need to change what works.
The bike was photographed just before the end of the year and still built up with 9000 Dura-Ace as most pro bikes we’ve seen have been so far. It does noticeably drop last year’s SRM power meter, awaiting the new integrated Dura-Ace one. Shimano has suggested to us that availability of the new groupset for the pro teams should be this month, so we’ll expect to see a lot more from the new R9100 components on bikes very soon.
With his Bora-Hansgrohe team training camp in Valencia, Sagan also got a chance to play with the new disc brake road bikes before the end of 2016. And it seems he enjoyed the new rides. We wonder what his team mechanics think every time they see him hop on a new bike?!
