Pro bike: Rigoberto Urán's Specialized S-Works Tarmac + video

Here’s a look at the brand new Specialized Tarmac that Rigoberto Urán is racing in this year’s Giro d’Italia, thanks to a video shot by GCN.

Specialized used the Giro d’Italia to unveil their brand new Tarmac, the big change being the size-specific development, which they say is ‘Rider-First Engineered’. Specialized have independently developed each of the six frame sizes with specific carbon fibre layup, tube diameters and headset bearing sizes. You can read about the new frame in detail in this article.

The Omega Pharma-Quick Step racer rides a 52cm Tarmac with a 120mm stem, 42cm handlebars and 170mm cranks. As team leader (and a potential to win the race outright, having finished second last year) Urán will have a few bikes at his disposal, including this regular bike in the team edition paint finish. 

To mark his Colombian roots, Specialized have also custom painted a special one-off Tarmac for Urán. There’s a strong tradition in recent years of manufacturers giving star riders custom-painted bikes, and Specialized haven’t wasted any time with their brand new Tarmac, but they usually wait until a rider wins a classification jersey out (we've already seen a pink Scott Foil in this race).

With the yellow, blue and red of the Colombian flag, and the yellow actually more of a glittery gold, it will for sure stand out in the peloton. What we assume are patterns from the Zenu Colombian indian tribe are printed on chainstays and forks.

Something we spotted on a few SRAM-equipped bikes over the weekend in Ireland are long cage WiFLi rear mechs already fitted to the bikes. With their 32t range they’re going to be needed when the large ratio cassettes come out to play as the race hits the mountains later in the race, but we weren’t expecting to see them yet. It might simply be they’ve decided to fit them from the outset to save having to change them later. SRAM recently released 11-32 and 11-30 ratio Red cassettes which will come in useful.  

The rest of the bike is regular fare: a SRAM Red 22 groupset with a 53/39 chainset, Zipp handlebars, stem and seatpost. There's just a small 5mm spacer above the stem, and nothing below it, just a shallow headset cap.

Wheels here are Zipp 404. We expect to see a switch to a shallower section wheelset, maybe the 303 or 202, when the race gets to the mountains. They're fitted with Specialized Turbo 24mm tubular tyres. 

Here you can see the new integrated seatpost clamp on the Tarmac. The idea here is to increase the amount of seatpost available for deflection in an effort to provide some vibration absorption on rougher roads.

It's clear from this photo that this is Urán's number two bike. This bike also doesn't have the Quarq crank-based power meter fitted, which the Colombian flag bike most definitely does.