Colnago V4RS

Simon Smythe is wowed by Tadej Pogačar's current race bike

- Simon Smythe

£12,599.95 | 7.15kg

As Oscar Wilde said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked .about. Which means that even though Tom Boonen and Dirk de Wolf suggested the Colnago V4RS is 2kph slower than its peers, angering Ernesto Colnago himself, the public row it caused has leapfrogged it miles ahead of its more mainstream rivals in terms of exposure.

Additionally, Tadej Pogačar this month rode the V4RS to victory on all three mountain stages at Paris-Nice and took the overall victory.

It could be the most talked about bike of 2023 so far. But what's the Colnago V4RS really like?

Construction

One of Boonen's remarks, translated from the Flemish, was that the V4RS was "old school" and that Colnago "hadn't quite mastered that super-hyper aero stuff yet."

I wonder if this is a lazy assumption. To create the bike, Colnago drafted in Norwegian industrial designer Torgny Fjeldskaar, who was design lead at BMC for five years and has the Roadmachine and the Teammachine in his portfolio.

The fact that Colnago very publicly hired a top foreign designer signals to me that the Italian brand accepts pure race bike must be free of those traditional, strongly held but vague notions of passione.

Fans of classic Colnagos might find Fjeldskaar's signature angular design features a little alien. Silver shading deliberately accentuates the edges. The V4RS is a weapon that was designed for Pogačar to use in his bid to win a third Tour and it looks like it.

The white paper supplies three different sets of data comparing the V4RS with the outgoing V3RS "in order to show the importance of a fully optimised platform" though not comparing like for like.

The best savings the optimised V4RS posted over the V3RS were 6% or 27.7 watts with a pedalling rider at 50kph.