Icons of cycling: Colnago Master
A divine design icon sent from heaven itself
Ernesto Colnago is often referred to as ‘God’. If God is, as John Lennon claimed, a concept by which we measure our pain, the decade that the Colnago Master spent in the pro peloton with its riders ripping their rivals’ legs off are proof of Signor Colnago’s status.
Colnago’s star was in the ascendant as soon as he left Eddy Merckx and Molteni to go it alone with his own name on the down tube with the Scic team in 1974. Eight years later Colnago’s most famous protégé, Giuseppe Saronni, won the World Championship road race at Goodwood. The following year, 1983, the launch of the revolutionary Master was marked by Saronni’s overall win in the Giro d’italia.
The Master had the silhouette of a traditional steel frame, but close up its tubes were far more radical. Colnago’s powerful riders were asking for stiffer frames, but without drastically increasing the weight of the frames this was not possible. So with Gilberto Colombo, older brother or Antonio Colombo who was now running the family firm Columbus, Colnago developed Gilco tubing. Gilberto Colombo specialised in race car chassis and had supplied Ferrari, Maserati and Lancia. He regarded the bicycle frame as a latticework structure similar to the tubular body of an automobile that required the best combination of rigidity and lightness. So for Colnago he developed a fluted tubing with a starshaped profile that would be stiffer along its vertical and horizontal axes with no weight penalty.
The Master was an instant success. The original fork was a standard curvedblade type, but four years later Colnago equipped the Master with his all-new straight-blade Precisa. By 1987 Colnago had already reached out to Enzo Ferrari and was beginning to incorporate F1 solutions into his bicycle designs. The Precisa was created after long research with Ferrari engineers. The straight blades absorbed shock better. The Precisa was criticised at first, but copied soon after. Something that was not in doubt was the sharp aesthetic it gave the Master.
As Colnago began to offer the Master in his new Art Décor paint schemes, a riot of masking, airbrushing and flamboyant dayglo colours with polished chrome lugs, stays and fork, it quickly became regarded as the classic Colnago and built a huge following.
The Master was updated and tweaked and went through several model names and iterations — there was the Master Olympic, the Master Piu, the Master Light and Master X-light — but the Master that is still handmade today in Cambiago, Italy, despite using DT15V tubing rather than Columbus Gilco, is still very much the same as it ever was: God’s own bike.