If you believe the rumour mill, a new Specialized Tarmac SL8 could appear at some point this year.
While that will be welcome news for some, the new bike I really want to see from Specialized is a Venge – the Californian brand’s defunct aero road bike .
I want a return to the days when Specialized pushed the boundaries of aero road bike design and its prevailing dogma was “aero is everything”.
There’s nothing wrong with the Tarmac. The Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL7 is undoubtedly one of the best climbing bikes available, and a fine all-rounder too.
For me, though, the Tarmac formula is just a little safe. It’s a ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ type bike.
That’s great if you’re only going to have one road bike – I even own a Giant TCR Advanced Pro Disc , a similarly racy, all-rounder road bike.
But in my dream garage (which, unlike that of my colleague, Warren Rossiter , currently exists only in my head), reports of the death of N+1 are greatly exaggerated. I’d love Specialized to bring us a slippery special in 2023. Re-Venge When Specialized launched the Tarmac SL7 back in June 2020 , much was made of its credentials as “one bike to rule them all”.So much so, in fact, that the Venge was retired immediately.Nestled away in the Tarmac SL7 press kit, though, was an interesting graph, with ‘Faster’ and ‘Lighter’ on its X and Y axis and a number of bikes plotted on it.Helpfully, Specialized circled […]
Continue reading the original article at: www.bikeradar.com