On 1 July, the INEOS Grenadiers team will take to the start line of the 2022 Tour de France on board ‘the fastest bike Pinarello has ever made’, the Bolide F.
World time trial champion Filippo Ganna and his team-mates Geraint Thomas, Adam Yates and Felipe Martinez will ‘officially launch’ the Bolide F in Copenhagen on the Tour’s opening stage after testing and racing a disguised version of the bike in the recent Tour de Suisse.
The new bike was also used by Ganna to secure his first victory at the Italian TT National Championships. In these early cameos, the bikes were wrapped in a special camo paint to disguise them ahead of the official release at the Tour when they will be unveiled with a unique custom paint scheme.
Originally created exclusively for Team Sky in 2013, the Bolide made its mark in 2015 when Sir Bradley Wiggins used the Bolide HR to break the Hour Record. Pinarello then introduced the Bolide TT in 2016, which went on to win TT competitions during Grand Tours, national and world championships on the road while also achieving success on the track, winning multiple medals in team and individual pursuit at world championships and the Olympics.
Building on that foundation, Pinarello has incorporated recent developments in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) that have helped its engineers to… ‘significantly improve aerodynamics on the new Bolide F.’
The company added that… ‘CFD simulations were run seamlessly in the cloud, allowing for proven aerodynamic advancements to be blended into the design process in real time. Cloud computing also allowed large scalability in terms of computational power – allowing large meshes in the order of 50m cells to be solved within hours – and number of simulations that could be run in parallel.’
Online access to the data also allowed a smooth sharing of the results between the designers, enhancing communication and improving the engineering process.
Improving handling and decreasing rolling resistance were two of the primary targets for the new Bolide F TT bike. To achieve this, the bike had to be designed to use disc brakes, which added a 1.4% aerodynamic deficit, when compared with the previous integrated rim brake Bolide.
The Italian bike firm added that this deficiency was recovered during the development process, thanks to a complete re-design of the seat-tube, seat-post, top stays and chain stays, which counter-balanced the increased aerodynamic drag of the disc brake to create an aerodynamically equivalent bike and rider system.
‘Total drag (bike and rider) is within 0.04% (0.0075N) of the previous Bolide TT using the PinaLab weighting scheme, which studied seven different yaw angles and eight different rider positions.’
Maintaining that aerodynamic performance was an important achievement for Pinarello’s engineers, especially given the performance benefits provided by the addition of disc brakes and the possibility to now use larger tyres up to 28mm on the Bolide F.
Most of Pinarello’s top athletes use custom 3D printed bar extensions. They are created by scanning the athlete’s forearms in the most aerodynamic position and then custom 3D printing in titanium. This allows for an optimised position and to close all gaps between the bar extensions and forearms, to achieve the absolute maximum in term of drag reduction.
This exclusive service is now also available to the public. It requires an appointment with a scanning centre located in UK or in Italy, which can be booked by contacting Pinarello directly through one of its official retailers. Pricing will be based on the result of a preliminary assessment.
In addition to designing a more aerodynamic bike, the company also reduced the weight of the frame kit and brakes by 170g.
- Bolide TT Rim brakes: 2,435g (size 55, including fork and bearings, seatpost, rim brakes with covers, and wires).
- Bolide F TT Disc brakes: 2,265g (size 55, including fork and bearings, seatpost, disc brakes and hydraulic tubes).
New tubes shapes and carbon lay-up patterns also deliver a claimed performance increase:
- Stiffness on the BB area is increased by 17%
- Stiffness on the head tube area is increased by 7%
- Fork is 12% stiffer fore/aft and 5% stiffer sideways
