Colnago has announced the colourway of the V5Rs that Tadej Pogačar and his UAE Team Emirates XRG teammates will ride next year.
The bike's colour remains black and white, but there’s a departure from the stripes to a more blocky design emanating from the head tube.
Colnago is calling the livery SDM6, and it incorporates red accents that were previously used only as the background colour of the Emirates logo.
There’s notably less paint in the design, with the black portion of the bike taking up more of the livery this year.
This is to keep weight down to a minimum, with the finish said to be as lightweight as possible.
We’ve seen this trend in Formula 1 over the past few seasons, with teams leaving a large portion of the cars unpainted to eke out marginal gains.
This has become so widespread that the F1 Commission has introduced new rules for 2026 that mandate a minimum of 55% of the car’s surface area must be covered by painted or stickered liveries as opposed to bare carbon fibre surfaces.
While we’re not sure if the UCI would ever clamp down to this extent, with the rider and their jersey being more easily differentiated than F1 cars, a peloton of the same carbon-shaded bikes wouldn’t showcase the sport's flamboyance in the same way.
Colnago says the livery of the Y1Rs will remain unchanged for 2026 and will be identical to the version used in 2025.
