Froome rides to second place in the Mont-Saint-Michel time trial on stage 11(Image credit: Scott Mitchell)
Team Sky's Mikel Landa warms up on a trainer ahead of his start at the Giro d'Italia(Image credit: Courtesy of Polartec-Kometa)
Mikel Landa's Pinarello Bolide TT made its debut in the Chianti time trial(Image credit: Tim de Waele/TDWSport.com)
The new Pinarello Bolide TT will be raced at the 2016 Giro d'Italia(Image credit: Pinarello)
The new Bolide TT frameset weighs a claimed 350g less than the previous iteration(Image credit: Pinarello)
Chris Froome has confirmed that he will ride the new Pinarello Bolide TT in this year's Tour de France. This will mark the Team Sky rider's first competitive outing on the new bike.
Froome used the Bolide in last year’s Tour but Mikel Landa debuted the 2016 version at the Giro d'Italia in May and it seems that his British teammate will follow suit on stage 13 of the Tour, a 37-kilometre test from Bourg-Saint-Andéol to La Caverne du Pont-d'Arc. Froome and the Tour de France contenders will ride custom road set-ups for the individual mountain time trial on stage 18 from Sallanches to Megève.
"That will be the first race I've used it," Froome told Cyclingnews exclusively at the Criterium du Dauphine.
Froome got his hands on the final version of the bike in May and along with Geraint Thomas used the new set-up in a wind tunnel before bringing it to Tenerife for a two-week training stint.
"I've done a fair few rides on it already and it seems great. They seem to have got the weight down a little bit compared to the last version and addressed a few little issues we had with the older version as well," Froome added.
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"They've improved the braking mechanism and it seems like they've found ways to make it stiffer and lighter. It seems to be a better ride."
Team Sky mechanic Gary Blem confirmed that the new version of the bike would be used at the Tour and that Pinarello had worked hard over the last two years to reduce weight and improve rider control.
"It will be what Landa used but obviously the position is different. The bike is lighter than the old Bolide. That's all saved from the frame and it's in the region of 300 grams," he told Cyclingnews.
"The shape and design of the frame has changed slightly. The top has a downward slope so in essence you're riding a smaller frame. That gives the rider more control and there's less material in the wind."
According to our sister site, BikeRadar, Pinarello has not said exactly how much the new frameset or complete bike weighs, but retailers selling the current Bolide claim that a size 52.5 frame weighs 1,044g, and it's reasonable to estimate that the fork would be at least 350g.
Daniel Benson was the Editor in Chief at Cyclingnews.com between 2008 and 2022. Based in the UK, he joined the Cyclingnews team in 2008 as the site's first UK-based Managing Editor. In that time, he reported on over a dozen editions of the Tour de France, several World Championships, the Tour Down Under, Spring Classics, and the London 2012 Olympic Games. With the help of the excellent editorial team, he ran the coverage on Cyclingnews and has interviewed leading figures in the sport including UCI Presidents and Tour de France winners.
