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If you want to go fast, like go fast everywhere, this is the bike. This is the bike that's made for everything from Grand Tours to your local fondo, and with a ground-up redesign, a heavy dose of aero wizardry, and of course, disc brakes, our "most complete race bike" is, well, even more complete.
If you want to go fast, like go fast everywhere, this is the bike. This is the bike that's made for everything from Grand Tours to your local fondo, and with a ground-up redesign, a heavy dose of aero wizardry, and of course, disc brakes, our "most complete race bike" is, well, even more complete.
Seven different sizes with the same tuned ride. The only way to do this is to obsess over every carbon ply and arrangement. It isn't the kind of glamorous work that lands you on the cover of magazines. Nope. It's scientists scrutinizing every thickness and shape, having heated arguments over stiffness targets and handling prowess like we have our own model UN, but you'd never notice that when you're riding a Tarmac. You'll just feel like you're riding the perfect bike.
We added 200 more pieces to this carbon layup. Why? We asked ourselves that same question after our fifth cup of coffee one night, but the answer is easy. You. The last Tarmac's layup was the most complex we'd ever created, but the added complexity found here has given us more opportunities to shave grams and tune the ride. You deserve the best ride in the world, after all, and it's our job to go to ridiculous lengths to give it to you.
We literally examine every ply of carbon on every single frame size we make to ensure that all of our performance targets come through on the finished product. The process is absurdly detailed, because what works on a 49cm doesn't work on a 61cm. So, to make sure you get the perfect ride, every frame gets a unique layup schedule with different ply arrangements, orientations, quantities of material in specific areas, and sometimes, even exclusive thicknesses and types of carbon itself.
Below, you'll find just a few of these places where this dark magic is applied:
Aerodynamics is the most important thing we can do to make you faster, and we spent half a year adding it wherever we could. If we found that more aero meant less of that golden Tarmac feeling, we cut it. Now, you get the best of both worlds—the Tarmac we always wanted to build, that just so happens to be as aero as the first Venge.
The aero development of the Tarmac took place over a six-month iterative process, but the knowledge of over six years, plus the data of countless aero projects, real world testing, and computation fluid dynamics, were all pulled for the Tarmac’s development. In the end, three areas were discovered where we could add aero for free—a new fork shape, dropped seatstays with aero tubes, and a D-shaped seatpost and seat tube. The result? A bike that’s approximately 45 seconds faster over 40 kilometers compared to other lightweight bikes in the same weight category.
Your fork is the first part of the frame to embrace the wind—we made sure it's slippery. This meant having to make aero-tuned fork blades in three different sizes, with each being individually tuned with a truncated airfoil. So yeah, you'll notice different sizes with the naked eye, but they all minimize the frontal profile as much as possible; especially when you take the smaller crown height into account.
If you're talking responsiveness, there's a good chance you're talking down tubes. It's one of the key contributors to the Tarmac's precise handling, after all, but the dance between aero optimization and handling is a delicate one—but one that we've mastered. Take a look and you'll notice that we've created a lengthy transition from the leading edge of the down tube to a relatively flat backend. This shape cuts through the wind while shielding the bottles from airflow, so you get big aero benefits without sacrificing a thing to handling or stiffness.
You won't sacrifice comfort, we won't sacrifice aero. Now, that's our kind of stalemate. Lucky for both of us, we both win on this one with a new D-shaped truncated airfoil seatpost. This new design performs better aerodynamically and feels awesome. There's some engineered flex at work here, with a progressive carbon layup that gets stiffer as you head down the tube. This means that you get flex and strength exactly in the places where you want it, so you get a blend of smoothness and aerodynamics that was previously impossible.
Just because we're in the business of hiding from the wind doesn't mean we're cowards. It means we're smart. We learned years ago with the Shiv TT that dropped seatstays hide the tube from the wind with no cost to stiffness, compliance, or responsiveness. Since then, we've pretty much done it to every road bike we make, and now you can find it here on the Tarmac. In the "biz," we call this a no-brainer.
If our name wasn't Specialized, we'd be comfortable hanging our hat on the Tarmac as our only aero offering. Good thing our engineers get free coffee.
No matter your skill level or experience on the bike, there's no better way to enhance your training and racing performance than by riding with a power meter. Lucky for you, we've combined our incredibly light and stiff, carbon fiber S-Works road cranks with dual-sided power measurement, making it the lightest (440g/172.5mm) and most accurate power meter available.
No matter your skill level or experience on the bike, there's no better way to enhance your training and racing performance than by riding with a power meter. Lucky for you, we've combined our incredibly light and stiff, carbon fiber S-Works road cranks with dual-sided power measurement, making it the lightest (440g/172.5mm) and most accurate power meter available.
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