Cav’s Custom Venge

by Simon · 26/05/2013

News

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Cav’s Custom Venge

April 2013

Think Mark Cavendish’s bike and you may well think Specialized Venge. The two, whilst not totally monogamous, have been in a pretty serious long-term relationship, with speed being a shared passion.

The Specialized Venge has helped Cav to numerous wins including the Green Jersey at the Tour de France and the Rainbow Jersey of World Road Race Champion. Today it helped him win the final stage of the Giro d’Italia and claim the Red Points Jersey as well. They make a good team.

In the build up to that red jersey, Cav celebrated his 100th career victory and Specialized, never a company to miss a great marketing opportunity, chose to get in on the party with a very special custom Cavendish S-Works Venge.

It has a special green finish to pay homage to that most sought after of sprinter’s prizes: the Green Jersey. Only a very limited number of replica frames will be available and it would certainly be a great bike to add to your collection if you have a spare $3,750 to hand – and yes, that’s just the frame.

Of course this frame is all about speed and it achieves that through advanced aerodynamics. Specialized see this as being key to the future development of all their frames and so they have decided to build their own wind tunnel.

Specialized say ‘Drag is the single biggest force affecting a cyclist, and since the only way to turn it off is to stop moving completely, eliminating every bit of it is critically important. In fact, it’s so important to us at Specialized, we’ve taken the next step in the evolution of our aerodynamics program.’

The aim is to allow the Specialized development team to control every aspect of the aerodynamics process in-house including the CFD software, on-bike data acquisition, and the wind tunnel testing, with the aim of driving aero forward, in ‘new and innovative directions’.

They’ve even got a new catchphrase, ‘Aero is everything’. But do you agree? Well Belgian bike brand, Ridley obviously do, as they are among a group of companies, which also includes Lazer helmets and Bioracer clothing, that have agreed a deal to open Europe’s first low-speed testing wind tunnel, ideal for the development of cycling equipment. It would seem that as far as cycling manufacturers are concerned, maybe aero is everything…

Here’s a quick video showing Cav’s custom Venge being built up…

And here’s a video showing the months of construction work on the new wind tunnel at Specialized headquarters, fortunately condensed into just over a minute.