Aero

We’d been watching this bike show up in the wild for months — a Traka 360 start line here, a blurry Eurobike hallway shot there — and today Canyon finally made it official. The third-generation Grail is out, and the headline change is the one every gravel racer with wide tires and a dream has been asking for: clearance jumped from 42mm to 57mm, enough for a 2.25-inch mountain bike tire if you want to run one. That’s not a trim update. That’s Canyon admitting the second-gen Grail was already outgunned by where gravel racing actually went. ...

That’s my old Crux leaning on a fence post in the photo up top — no aero tube shaping, no wind tunnel time, not even the current generation of the bike. And I had a great day on it. I just finished writing up the new Canyon Grail, and buried in the press materials was a stat that stuck with me more than the tire clearance number did: Canyon tested the bike in a wind tunnel with a pedaling mannequin, simulating yaw angles up to 20 degrees, to chase watts at a race pace of 35 km/h. That’s a genuinely sophisticated piece of engineering. It’s also a lot of institutional effort spent on a question I’m not sure enough people are asking: faster toward what? ...

The Zipp 454 NSW has been around long enough that the internet has moved on to reviewing whatever launched last month. That works in your favor if you’re shopping smart. I picked up a set recently for around $1,600 — roughly a third of the $4,450 retail you’d pay for the current production pair — and spent some time thinking hard about whether the technology has actually aged or just the press coverage. ...