Cinelli Pressure

All-new aero with unrealised potential

The Italian marque is returning to its road racing roots with its new aero bike – but has affordability come at the expense of speed?

Open mould. It used to be a dirty phrase because it meant carbon product X came out of a mould that anyone could access, and hence it tended to be lower quality. Closed mould, by contrast, meant exclusive. Exclusive meant money, and money meant high levels of quality control and R&D. Yet as technology has trickled down, open mould components are now often very good in quality terms and near identical in design. It’s hard to defend intellectual property in the Far East, so they say.

The aero-fied Pressure is unashamedly open mould, albeit Cinelli vice-president Fabrizio Aghito says it ‘is a shared project’ with the factory that makes it. Cinelli used its own research to pick this frame from many others on the grounds that its shape was specifically fast, he says. Cinelli also specified it be built with a more advanced and more costly EPS moulding process – where polystyrene mandrels are used instead of air bladders to give better compaction, higher strength and lower weight.

I’ll accept all of this at face value, and certainly the finish of the frame is quite glorious – when turned, the backside of the fork crown even reveals a little smiley face. A claimed 990g for the frame and 390g for the fork is reasonable for an aero bike, and it’s also wonderfully clean to look at – all cables hidden – with room for 30mm tyres. But after this promising start I suddenly found the Pressure and me in conflict.

Heavy hitter

Whatever else an aero bike is, it needs to be noticeably fast, and in this build the Pressure isn’t. The reason? It is nearly 10kg – and feels it.

Out of the traps, accelerating and climbing, the Pressure felt somewhat anchored and the ride muted and lumpy. So where on earth was the Pressure hiding the kilos? It just had to be the wheels, and lo and behold, shorn of rotors and cassette they weighed in at a staggering 3,197g. The Pressure deserved a wheel swap.

Here a few people will groan, because the only wheels I had to hand were DT Swiss ARC 1100s, all 1,472g of them. Done up with 28mm Schwalbe Pro One tubeless tyres the set weighed 2,092g. Total cost just over £2,200. Of course these wheels would make any bike better, but let’s leave that at the door for now and focus on what the Pressure revealed itself to be.

The frame is a unit at the back, making for the kind of bike you can cause to skip a rear wheel