We're going to talk about the all-around performance road

bike, the Tarmac.

This bike does it all, and does it all fast.

We're going to talk about how this bike climbs, how well it

handles, and how it just gets up and goes in the flat out

fastest sprint you could possibly want.

So let's talk about the climbing

ability of the Tarmac.

Now, this bike is insanely light.

This is a sub-900 gram frame in the S-Works, and we were

able to take the stiffness to weight ratio up 19% over the

previous generation, the SL3.

But to pull that off, it's not easy to do, and the engineers

spent an incredible amount of time looking at every fiber,

every bit, every way to construct the frame.

And what we have here is a new way to

build the FACT IS frame.

So the frame is actually constructed in

four separate pieces.

You have your top-tube, head-tube, and most of your

down-tube are really unique.

One piece BB chain-stay, your c-tube, and then your seat

stays in the back.

And when you can build these pieces individually, you can

build them for the weight, the stiffness, exactly what you

need to do, and come out with the best product that's going

to fly up the hills, but also be nice and stiff, exactly

where you need it.

So this is the SL4 frame, super light and stiff.

So the handling on the Tarmac is part of what makes this

bike so much fun to ride, very responsive, very snappy, comes

to life right underneath you, and we're going to get that

from three parts of the bike.

First part is in the front end.

The head-tube angle, this is a pretty traditional style

head-tube angle, steep, agile.

It's going to respond to your inputs.

But if you look closely, you'll notice it's a tapered

head-tube, 1 1/8 to 1 3/8, leading into this big old

beefy fork here.

And that's going to give us a lot of stiffness, a lot of

confidence when you're laying into those corners.

Moving down towards the bottom of the bike, the bottom

bracket is low.

You're going to feel planted in those corners, but it's not

so low that you're going to scrape your petals when you're

peddling through the corners, so a lot of speed, a lot of

confidence.

And then when we move into the chain-stays, short

chain-stays, going to be responsive, make the bike easy

to accelerate and get up to speed, very good flickable

turning, as well.

So at the end of the ride, it's all about the sprint.

You've got to put this away, put a bow on it, come across

the line in first place.

And the Tarmac is constructed to do that, and there's a few

places that we want to talk about, how we get that done.

The head-tube here, this is a hyperbolic head-tube.

So it's got this interesting shape to it, where there's no

flat edges, and what we're trying to do there is make it

light on the top, but don't allow the carbon fibers to

breathe and flex at all, just make it super stiff and

responsive.

So when you pulling on the handlebars and really just

trying to get every ounce of power out of the bike, it's

not going to move underneath you.

Going down to this big old beefy down-tube, it's going to

be super stiff, and then into a really unique constructed

one piece bottom bracket chain-stay.

This is where the power transfer is all about.

You want those two pieces together, no interruptions,

big, stiff, light.

Put the power down, Tarmac's going to take

you across the line.

So three things I want to talk about on this Tarmac here that

are super cool.

One is the Roval Repede CLX40 wheels.

Just like the bike, these things are all about being

lightweight, and stiff, and getting up to speed and going.

So, these are 40 millimeter clincher carbon wheels with

sealed ceramic bearings, super nice.

The crankset here, this is our S-Works FACT crankset, very,

very light and stiff, crazy light and stiff, also really

cool that it comes with standard gearing.

That's 53/39, but if that's not your style of gearing, you

want to change it out, great, no problem.

It has a removal spider.

You can put whatever gearing on there's

going to make you happiest.

And the last piece-- the one that's going to take us home--

is the Body Geometry saddle.

Doesn't matter how fast or slow you're going, you got to

stay comfortable on the bike, you got to keep blood flowing

where it needs to be flowing.

That Body Geometry saddle is going to do exactly that.

So that's the Tarmac, the all-around performance race

bike, one of my favorite bikes to ride the whole wide world.