An unreleased Canyon time trial bike with a wide stance, dual-crow fork has been leaked in a video posted on X by Eurosport España and the Spanish cycling federation.
The video shows riders from the Spanish national team heading out to train ahead of the upcoming UCI Road World Championships in Montreal, Canada.
The bike is first shown leaning up against a wall in the team hotel, before Iván Romeo, the 2024 under-23 time trial world champion, rides it out of the underground car park and onto the road.
Although we’ve only got a few low-resolution images to go by, here’s what we can surmise about the new bike so far.
Canyon backtracks on wide forks
The most notable design feature is the bike’s wide stance, dual-crown fork, that's clearly inspired by the fork on Team Great Britain’s Hope HB.T.
The fork is significantly wider than that on the current Speedmax CFR TT, but appears to narrow as it extends towards the front hub – especially on the non-driveside – rather than staying wide and arching in, as on the Hope bike.
At the top, the fork extends beyond the lower crown, meeting the base bar, while the head tube appears to have been narrowed significantly compared to the existing model.
Integrated aero extensions look to be stacked directly on top of where the fork meets the base bar, on either side of the head tube.
On the Hope HB.T, the wide stance fork is designed to break the airflow over the riders legs – for a net reduction in aerodynamic drag – so it’s possible Canyon is looking for a similar effect here.
This approach is particularly notable because Canyon previously told BikeRadar that it “couldn’t see the reason” for wide forks, when it launched the Speedmax CFR Track in 2023.
The Speedmax CFR Track has an extremely narrow fork and wide seat stays. Lukas Schuchnigg, Canyon's development lead for the Speedmax CFR Track, told Bikeradar: “From [Canyon’s] perspective, we couldn’t see the reason for the wide stance design”, adopted by the likes of Hope.
“A narrower stance offers the same aerodynamic advantages, while also being stiffer.”
That bike also used a mono-riser setup for aero extensions, instead of dual extensions.
It seems the German brand has had a change of heart, then, or at least a change of testing methodology that has unlocked some new and previously unknown insight into this design.
Colnago-inspired aero bottle
Although there are big changes at the front of the new bike, the rear looks more or less unchanged compared to the current version.
There are the same deep-section, truncated aerofoil tubes, aero seatpost and aero seat stays dropped low on the seat tube.
One interesting detail, however, is the presence of a filled-in section above the bottom bracket.
The current UCI technical regulations wouldn’t permit the frame tubes to be that large, so we suspect this is a water bottle designed to integrate with the aerodynamic shaping of the frame.
To our eye, it looks a lot like the water bottle used on Tadej Pogačar’s old time trial bike, the Colnago TT1.
Though the Italian brand has now moved away from this design with the new TT2, Canyon clearly thinks there’s still something to it.
Beyond that, the bike is set up with standard Movistar time trial kit, including a set of Zipp time trial wheels, and a 1x SRAM Red AXS groupset.
When will the new Canyon Speedmax be released?
This particular bike appears to belong to Movistar's Iván Romeo, a former under-23 time trial world champion.
Given Romeo is training on it in Montreal, ahead of this weekend’s racing, and the current model is currently on sale on Canyon’s website (with 25 per cent off), we suspect Canyon is using the world championships as a teaser ahead of an official launch soon afterwards.
