Colnago C68 Road

The flagship has been refitted, but it's still very Colnago

- JAMES SPENDER

First thing’s first: this is the Colnago C68 Road Disc, not to be confused with the C68 Allroad or the soon-to-be-released C68 Gravel. As such, it replaces the C64 (there was only ever one C64) in spirit, albeit it is quite a departure in design.

Each frame is still made in Italy, but tyre clearance jumps from 28mm to 32mm and the famous lugged construction is now more like ‘lugged monocoque’.

‘There are six parts of the frame as opposed to the eight parts in the C64,’ says Colnago’s head of R&D, Davide Fumagalli. ‘Splitting the frame like this meant we could increase the stiffness of the front end, which was compromised by having a junction in the most stressed area of the frame – the top of the down tube.’

Unlike the C64, whose front end comprised a one-piece head tube lug into which top and down tubes were bonded, the C68’s head tube and down tube are moulded as a single piece, eliminating that lug/tube junction. The bottom bracket cluster gets similar treatment – the C64 had a single BB lug/cluster whereas the C68’s seat tube and BB cluster is one piece.

This is all neat engineering but I can’t say I’m not a little sad. It marks the end of the aesthetic and feeling that a C-Series bike was a steel Colnago, just cast in carbon. But this is weepy-eyed nostalgia; the brief was always to be the best race bike, it’s just that Colnago has come up with what it believes is a better solution.

Keeping on in that vein, the BB is now T47 (although Colnago points out the C60’s old ThreadFit 82.5 system was really the precursor to T47, with its press-fit, threaded alloy sleeve), and headset bearings are CeramicSpeed SLT – ‘solid lubrication technology’. These are clever.