SPECIALIZED S- WORKS VENGE
The third generation Venge might be Specialized’s best yet
It’s been almost a decade since Specialized launched the original Venge, where it won big at the 2011 Milan-Sanremo under Matt Goss. The aero road bike didn’t start with the Venge though – that accolade goes to Cervélo – but Specialized’s bike bought cutting-edge aerodynamics to the fore. Now road bikes of all types have some sort of aerodynamic consideration factored into their design and we are now even seeing it in gravel bikes, e-bikes and city-bound hybrids. The early Venge and its successor, the Venge ViAS, both won a stack of races, but there was a trade off in cutting-edge aero as they were heavier than traditional road bikes and somewhat firmer riding too.
In the nine years since, Specialized has put all of its chips into research and development at its Morgan Hill California headquarters, building a state-of-the-art wind tunnel, carbon research labs, mechanical testing lab and even outdoor testing tracks with imported
TH EVEN GE SPECIALIZED BOUGHT
CUTTING EDGE AERO DYNAMICS TO
THE FORE AND ITS MANTRA OF‘ AERO IS EVERYTHING’ HAS BEEN MUCH REPEATED
Belgian cobbles making up Pavé sections. All the investment lead to massive gains in bikes such as the Roubaix and the Tarmac. While the Venge ViAS was an incredibly aerodynamically efficient bike, it was also a very complex one to build and maintain and it was significantly heavier than the equivalent Tarmac. The goal of the latest Venge was to make it even more slippery through the air, but to also overcome the challenges of excess weight and complexity.
“The primary focus of the Venge is aerodynamics,” says Stewart Thompson, road category leader. “We already had an incredibly fast bike with the ViAS, and the question on our mind was, ‘How do we do more with less?’ Less complexity, less weight, less surface area — we started by calculating the surface area of numerous frame designs. And we found a very strong correlation between overall weight and frame surface area. Beyond that, we also noticed a high correlation between desirable frame stiffness and the structurally efficient tube shapes found on traditional ‘round tube’ bikes. The challenge then was: what tube shapes could we develop that could give up nothing aerodynamically and yet have a more efficient use of material?”
Specialized was able to prioritise elements of a frame in terms of how important they were to the bike’s aerodynamics: fork blades, cockpit, seatstays and seatpost. The goals of the new bike included a much greater emphasis on weight. From this, tube shapes were further developed, a process that came from engineers working on an optimisation algorithm, which was all fed into a super-computer that created new airfoil shapes that were optimised for different weight, structural targets and low drag. Specialized coined this ‘freeshape optimisation’ and created its own airfoil shape library. This catalogue of shapes contributed to the design of the new Roubaix, Tarmac and even the gravel Diverge. From here, numerous prototypes were assembled and tested in-house for aero performance, structural integrity and realworld readiness.
Of course the goal of Venge is to make a fast aerooptimised machine. But for this Venge, Specialized was just as focused on making a great handling bike with it. Stewart says: “While aerodynamic efficiency is the north star on the Venge, weight and ride quality followed close behind. Our pro athletes and their feedback was really critical to this process.”
Because of the broad levels of investment into R&D at Specialized by as early as the third iteration of the burgeoning Venge design it had built close to production- level carbon frames. With this they could tune specific areas on the chassis using a full bike (with rider dummy) in the wind tunnel. This led to a change in the head-tube profile, gaining significant drag savings from a small tweak to the shape, which only had a minor effect on the overall weight. ‘When we perform R&D on the Venge and Tarmac platforms,” explains Chris Yu, head of applied technologies, “we generally learn many new things that ultimately inform the future design for both models... the Tarmac has become more aerodynamic and the Venge has become lighter and more structurally efficient.”
THE GOAL OF VEN GE IS TO MAKE A FAST AERO OPTIMISED MACHINE. BUT FOR THIS V EN GE, SPECIALIZED WAS JUST AS FOCUSED ON MAKING A GREAT HANDLING BIKE