Weaponising the white paper

Colnago's head of R&D Davide Fumagalli tells Simon Smythe why it's not enough to have the world's best rider winning races on your bike...

- Simon Smythe

Dirk De Wolf and Tom Boonen’s Colnago-bashing Wielerclub Wattage podcast, in which De Wolf claimed there was a 2kph difference between the Italian brand’s new V4Rs bike and the best competitor WorldTour bikes, made the biggest headlines when Colnago struck back. Rather than waving a white flag, Colnago instead waved its white paper: “Here is our data. Where is yours?”

The exchange served to reinforce the position of the white paper in today’s bike industry. Namely, if you are going to make particular claims you’d better be able to back them up with data.

Boonen climbed down and apologised, despite being invited to Cambiago for a “public conversation”.

“I was hoping to be able to ride with Tom,” says Colnago’s head of R&D Davide Fumagalli. “I always admired him for the way he raced.”

However, Fumagalli is less impressed with the 2kph claim, actually made by De Wolf, not Boonen, he emphasises.

“If you ride a bike and you say ‘I don’t like it, this one’s too stiff, not stiff enough, too heavy, too light’ that’s fair enough. But if you say ‘this bike is 2kph slower than that one’ you have to prove it.”

According to Fumagalli, a white paper is not a tool to communicate the new bike – the white paper actually is the new bike. It is the collection of the information about the bike, “an open share of information”.

However, for the onlooker enjoying the spat, it’s slightly disappointing that Colnago’s white paper doesn’t prove for its part that the V4Rs is faster than the bikes De Wolf mentioned (the Cervélo S5 and R5, Pinarello Dogma F and Specialized Tarmac SL7). Why not?