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The Soloist is Cervélo’s latest race bike that aims to split the difference performance-wise between the brand’s lightweight R5 and aero S5 bikes.
The Soloist uses a similar geometry to the R5 and the frameset is lightweight, but concessions have been made to aerodynamics in an attempt to make it a versatile race bike.
However, the Soloist’s do-it-all nature is not intended to supplant either of the bikes it takes design cues from at WorldTour level. Rather, Cervélo says it wants to offer a race solution for amateur riders by designing something practical at more accessible price points.
So aside from a racy geometry and wind-tunnel-derived tube shaping, the Soloist has a cockpit design that allows for standard parts and mechanical cable routing, it has 34mm of tyre clearance and it uses the BBrighT-47 bottom bracket standard Cervélo debuted on the R5-CX cyclocross bike.
There are six full builds available, with prices ranging from the £3,500 Shimano 105 model to a £7,100 SRAM Force eTap AXS model.
In keeping with the unique needs of the amatuer racers and experienced riders the Soloist is designed for, there is a frameset only option too, available for £3,000.
It is widely accepted that the original Cervélo Soloist kickstarted the trend for aerodynamic bike design in the early 2000s and with bikes like the newly released S5, the brand has successfully stayed at the cutting edge of the niche ever since as well.
Cervélo credits its longstanding involvement with the pro side of the sport with the brand being able to maintain the quality of its race products.
‘Mark Cavendish was instrumental in the stiffness performance of the S5 and Tom Dumoulin was the one who helped us improve comfort in the latest R5, says Cervélo’s Bryan Bernard.
However, until now the primary remit of Cervélo’s aero bikes have been to serve racers at the top of the sport and while the Cervélo says the Soloist is capable enough to do that, the brand says it wanted to offer something to the amateur racers and keen riders who wanted an aggressive bike but who don’t have their own mechanics and have to pay for their equipment.
Cervélo has in effect put its money where its mouth is to a certain extent in this regard: the Cervélo-sponsored Jumbo-Visma Development Team – which is populated by talented racers that aren’t yet pros – have been given the Soloist as their de facto race bike and only get the option to use the R5 and S5 models if/once they graduate to the proper Jumbo-Visma team.
Despite the perceived limitation of this situation Cervélo says there have been no grumbles from the development squad.
Scott Roy, Cervélo’s lead product engineer on the Soloist project, says there are plenty of high-profile areas to start a bike design from, but the broader Soloist design originated from a surprising component.
‘The rest of the Soloist was informed by its seatpost shape,’ he says.
‘It was crucial to get right, and once we did nailed it, it drove the seat tube profile, which informed the bottom bracket junction, which in turn helped shape the down tube.’
Roy says that after first simply cutting the tail off an S5 seatpost, Cervélo went through 35 iterations before it settled on the best one.
‘To give some context, a change might have been to change the trailing edge dimension by 0.2mm, which would then improve performance by as much as 15%,’ he says.
Unsurprisingly given the bike’s wider design outcome, the Soloist’s seatpost shape is somewhere halfway between the extended S5 post and the shallow R5 one, which is a theme that can be broadly applied to most other areas of the frameset.
‘We actually had to develop an entirely new set of tube profiles for the Soloist,’ says Roy. ‘In R5 and S5 terms, in our “tube profile library” we’ve got light tube shapes and we’ve got fast shapes, so we had to start from scratch to get a set somewhere in the middle.’
So that means all over the bike there is evidence of aerofoil shapes, but they’ve been more heavily truncated than they would have been if deployed in the S5. As a result, the Soloist is a claimed 254g lighter than the S5 in the same size, despite being 172g ‘faster’ than the R5.
Roy says Cervélo tends to quantify aero drag in grams rather than watts because watts are dependent on speed. To give context in wattage terms though, Roy says the Soloist is just 11 watts slower than the S5 at 45kmh and tests quickly against every all-round race bike Cervélo has been able to benchmark it against.
'Extra little features beyond the overall tube shapes have helped in the aero stakes too,’ says Roy. ‘Such as the nose cone-like extension of the headtube out over the front wheel, plus tighter radii at the transition to the back of the truncated profiles.’
Cervélo says it has been careful not to tread on the toes of either of its race bikes with the Soloist, but by offering a high-performance solution for normal riders, it is reasonable to question the continued validity of the brand’s Caledonia, which itself is a sort of aero/endurance hybrid.
Cervélo says it has created clear water between the Caledonia and Soloist in their respective geometry charts. The Soloist is a lot more aggressive, with a steeper head tube angle and short chainstays creating a much shorter wheelbase. It has a higher bottom bracket and markedly less trail too for a given tyre size, which combines to suggest the Soloist should be far more quick-handling than the Caledonia.
The platforms do have design elements in common though, namely geared around practicality and the facilitation of everyday use by normal riders.
There is the Soloist’s 34mm of tyre clearance for starters, but equally important (though perhaps a little less obvious) is how Cervélo has designed the bike’s bottom bracket standard and headset arrangement.
Cervélo has moved to what it dubs BBrighT-47, which is an asymmetric version of the popular T-47 oversize threaded standard. Felt has adopted something similar on its Breed Carbon gravel bike – essentially instead of using a pair of either inboard or outboard bearing cups, BBrighT-47 uses a standard outboard T47 cup on the driveside and a standard inboard T47 cup on the non-driveside.
‘BBrighT-47 incurs a small weight penalty over our BBright press-fit standard but we think it offers the same structural advantages and it is easier to remove and service for normal riders too,’ says Roy.
The headset/cable routing arrangement was considered with a similar perspective on practicality.
Cables run externally from the bars but a guide routed them neatly down the front of the headeset spacers, where a new bearing cap and bearing split ring combines with a D-shaped steerer and oversize upper headset bearing to offer the space to get cables inside the frame.
The design allows any conventional aftermarket bars and stems to be used with the bike, as well as both electronic and mechanical drivetrains, which is more than can be said for many modern race bikes.
Find out more about the new Cervélo at cervelo.com
The Soloist uses the same frameset through the range and will be available in six builds: four electronic (two options each from Shimano and SRAM) and two Shimano mechanical builds at the bottom of the range.
Both top-level electronic specs get Cervélo’s components brand Reserve’s 40/44 wheels, but the Force eTap AXS build comes with the power meter version of the Force AXS chainset and costs £300 more than the Shimano Ultegra Di2 version.
A frameset only option will be available to for £3,000. The black and gold colour options will be available in all builds while the ‘Alpenglow’ white is only available at 105 level, and sizes range from 48cm to 61cm.
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