New road bikes we will see in 2023

To anticipate what bike brands will surprise us in the coming year is a kind of guessing game in a market that has yet to recover from the ups and downs of recent years, so brands are increasingly trying to extend developments whose creation consumes enormous resources.

Renew or die

The brands are constantly struggling with the need to offer new bikes, beyond the annual updates of colors and components, in order to maintain the brand's appeal and the potential customer's attention. Also, developing a bike today takes a tremendous amount of effort, not only in terms of time, but also in terms of human and material resources.

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The life cycle, which was around two seasons, has been lengthened to amortize the bikes that cost so much to create. It must be considered that a major modification of a model or the launch of a new one implies an improvement or the incorporation of new technologies.

To mention the last major changes involving substantially different models occurred around five years ago, with the introduction of disc brakes and, in recent seasons, with the standardization of fully internal cable routing. The latest trend affects aerodynamic bikes where the renovations seek to take advantage of the latest update of the UCI rules that eliminated the obligation to maintain a 3:1 ratio between the width of the tubes and their depth.

The candidates for change

In this guessing exercise we will have to rely on bikes that changed for the last time around 2019 since between 3 and 4 years seems to be the figure set as the standard life cycle of current bikes. A useful life that in many cases is stretched with small modifications such as those of the new Cervélo S5, practically identical to the one launched in 2017 and that this past year received an update with adjustments in the steering area.

During the professional teams' training camps over the last few weeks we have been able to see some bikes that will surely be renewed during this season. This is the case of the Canyon Aeroad of which we saw Mathieu Van der Poel using a prototype that looked like a new bike.

Rumors of a new bike were also raised by the new handlebars being used by riders on Specialized bikes, which could lead us to believe that a new Tarmac could be on the way, although in this scenario, it is unlikely to be anything more than a facelift to the existing one, which has only been on the market for a couple of seasons.

Another renewal that seems certain is that of the Cannondale SuperSix, the benchmark of the American brand, of which we saw a prototype a few days ago in the hands of the new EF Education-EasyPost rider Andrey Amador. Still at Cannondale, another bike due for a makeover would be its aerodynamic SystemSix model, a bike that has taken a back seat with the evolution towards aerodynamics that completely transformed the SuperSix.

2022 brought us a new Scott Foil, which maximized its aerodynamic qualities while seeking a more competitive weight. It is not unreasonable to think that this new season it will be its sister Addict that receives a new look, a bike that dates from 2019 and that, although it has a fully current design and technologies, after 3 years it is reasonable to think that it could receive some changes.

Nor would it be strange to see some refinements to Giant's TCR, a brand that completely revamped its Propel aerodynamics a few months ago. The TCR climber, although its current version was launched in 2020 is one of the few bikes where we can still see cables coming out of the handlebar tape. In any case, it would not be a drastic change but we imagine it would focus on achieving that demanded clean lines.

Another bike that has long been unchanged from those currently on the market is the aerodynamic Ridley Noah, a 2018 development prior to UCI rule changes affecting aerodynamics, so it could be a good candidate to undergo a major change.

However, all this remains mere assumptions based on the usual way of acting in the brand, something that is not extrapolated in times where new developments are increasingly carried in secret and in many cases, we do not get to know anything until these new bikes are presented to the press. So we will have to arm ourselves with patience and wait until June when the Dauphiné becomes the testing ground before the imminent Tour de France, which in recent years has become the perfect loudspeaker for the new bikes.