SPECIALIZED VENGE VIAS
Radically aero, disc brakes and top-of-the-range shifting, the new Specialized Venge Vias eTap Disc is cutting-edge throughout. But is it a great bike for tri?
It’s the fastest steed ever produced by Spesh. Yet will the top-end Venge be a fit for tri?
When a bike brand as huge as Specialized throws all its might at a new aero racer, this is what you get: the intricate, integrated and complex Venge Vias.
Five builds are available (£3,900-9,000), plus a frame module (with bar, stem, post, rim brakes, bottle cage) and a disc-only frameset. This is the eTap Disc version; it’s the second most expensive but arguably the most significant, with SRAM’s wireless electronic shifting and hydraulic disc brakes. There’s a risk of those components stealing the show, but our interest is in the whole package.
While many aero-road bikes now look similar, the Venge Vias stands apart. Its riser bar allows a flat stem for a minimal frontal area, and the head tube and fork are carefully shaped to cleave the air, guiding it onto that radical down tube which appears to revive the front wheel cut-out idea.
We quizzed three Specialized engineers. They explained that each half of the down tube has its own aerodynamic function. The top half interacts with the fork, head tube and front wheel; the lower part meets cleaner air and works more independently to guide air over the bottom bracket and seat tube. The down tube cut-out actually serves to join the two halves together more than to control airflow from the front wheel.
They also told us that the down tube and seat tube were designed with bottles in place, and if you’re only carrying one it doesn’t matter where you put it. The feature that produces most drag saving is, they say, the cockpit, achieving as much as the frame and fork combined. It was also the most costly in terms of R&D, owing to the cabling.
SPECIAL BUILD
After the SRAM groupset, the rest of the build is all Specialized: CLX64 tubeless-ready and discspecific wheels, S-Works Turbo Tubeless tyres, an S-Works Power saddle and an S-Works Aerofly handlebar. Oh, and it comes with a Quarq power meter spinning in a CeramicSpeed BB. Very cool.
Because the internal cabling must be exactly the right length, the Venge Vias has to be built to
fit you, ideally following a Specialized Body Geometry fit session (which we did). Once it’s built you can’t change anything without re-cabling it, which does mean it’s awkward to travel with.
The eTap shifting is brilliant and easy to use. You can multi-shift, tap a lever from almost any bar position and feel a clear click… what you can’t do is mis-shift. It’s ahead of Di2, in our opinion.
The 52-36, 11-28 gearing will get you – and the bike’s less-than-svelte 7.9kg – over mountains, but the cassette is horribly gappy for an aero bike.
LONG-COURSE COMFORT
The hydraulic disc brakes are shockingly powerful to start with, yet easy to modulate once you’re tuned in. The discs respond faster in the wet but sometimes shriek in use and, surprisingly, another old rim brake issue was still present – pad rub when out of the saddle.
The Venge is stiff under power and steers very accurately. It has real long-distance comfort, too, thanks to the brilliant Power saddle and an impressive ability to damp out road buzz. You can’t reverse the seatpost for a more glute-friendly position, though, and that’s likely to be the biggest factor for your run legs after parking in T2.
What matters most, though, is speed. Specialized claim that when combined with their Evade helmet and skinsuit and S-Works Sub6 shoes the Venge can help save 5:30mins over 40km. Thus equipped, we rode 100 miles flat out and got home (shattered) in 4:20hrs, an average of 23.1mph from 260W. It looked like this bike really is fast: but we wanted to break down Specialized’s claims, so we set up a four-way timed test.
We rode a 10km course at 320W, in the drops with slight elbow bend and the same bottles in each bike. Rides were completed within two hours, during which time the weather was consistent. Each bike was set up with the same position.
The first run on a non-aero road bike with non-aero gear took 15:24mins; the second on the Venge with non-aero gear took 15:28mins; the third on the Venge in the S-Works gear (the same helmet, skinsuit and shoes) took 14:58mins; and the fourth in the S-Works gear on a Ridley Noah SL aero-road bike on similar 65mm wheels (to put the Venge’s speed in context) took 14:33mins.
It’s clear that the S-Works gear is much faster, saving 30secs over 10km, but the Venge Vias was actually slower than the non-aero bike. Here is where the Ridley provides useful context, going 25secs faster (1:40mins in 40km) than the Venge Vias. We put this to Specialized’s engineers.
They acknowledged that they ‘controlled all the variables well’ and told us, ‘We’re confident in the performance of the bike.’ They suggested that small position changes between bikes might have caused the unexpected result. We recognise that we can’t guarantee exactly the same wind conditions, but these results are still meaningful.
The Venge Vias is smooth, boasts the best shifting and strongest brakes. But it isn’t light, the brakes are noisy and, in our test at least, it didn’t fully convince us of its speed.