This Chinese brand claims there's no 'faster all-round road frameset' on the market - Here's what our wind tunnel results say

Although it's a relatively new brand on the market when it comes to making performance bikes, Seka has come in strong with its latest road model, the Spear. Like XDS with the X-Lab bikes, Seka is a Chinese company making its bikes in China. Given that most carbon frames are made in Asia already, Seka claims to offer the same performance as the brand-name European and American competitors, but for a reduced outlay.

This latest Spear model is presented as an all-round race bike, and it's easy to see why. It has the usual integrated cable routing, one-piece bar and stem combination, as well as kamm-tailed bladed tubing.

Beyond that, though, it also features a lot of small touches and refinements aimed at improving aerodynamic performance. The fork dropouts have a slight rearwards extension, similar to the Pinarello Dogma F or X-Lab AD9. Meanwhile, the dropouts have a removable cover.

Bikes such as the Cannondale SuperSix have blind dropouts, which can offer a small aero saving, but any thread issues and the fork is more or less finished. Removable covers mean potentially a longer lifespan in the event of issues. There are also aero bottle cages, similar to those used by Factor and Colnago, but not integrated bottles like the Wilier Filante SLR.

There is one eye-catching addition to this frame, though, that sets it apart from many aero road bikes on the market.

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Much like the Trek Madone and the Cinelli Aeroscoop, the Seka Spear uses additional holes in the frame, allegedly for compliance and aero performance.

Whereas the Madone situated this around the junction of the top-tube, down-tube, and seat-stays, the Spear implements this in a way similar to the Aeroscoop, creating a dual-legged junction from the seat-tube to the seat-stays. Seka calls this the Wind Eye. The brand claims this "suppresses turbulence caused by low pressure areas at the seat tube and rear wheel" while also claiming to add additional compliance.

A nice addition to the Seka Spear is the broad amount of data regarding the frame made public on its website. Watt savings at specific speeds are mentioned, as the bike was designed with input from Aerocoach and also used the Silverstone wind tunnel for development. There is a link to the White Paper detailing development and data, but that link appears not to be working right now.

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Something interesting of note about the Seka Spear, though, is that for all the aero design features, it is a lightweight and fairly slim tubed bike in many places. The bottom bracket is not overly aero sculpted, the down-tube and seat-tube do not curve around the wheels, and the front-facing head-tube and seat-post are not the narrowest. It is very much an all-rounder bike, similar to the Tarmac SL8, where aero performance has been maximised while a big focus on keeping a low weight has also driven development.

Indeed, Seka states that "you won't find a faster all-round road frameset than Spear", but does that claim stand up to our testing?

The test protocols

For this test, to ensure maximum accuracy and the ability to compare across tests, we followed the same protocol as used in our two prior wind tunnel aero bike tests. Those include the 2024 test, which covered bikes like the S-Works Tarmac SL8, Trek Madone, and Canyon Aeroad, and the 2025 test that covered dedicated aero bikes, such as the Cervélo S5, Colnago Y1Rs, and Factor ONE.

That means we took the Seka Spear to the wind tunnel at the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub, and tested it against our baseline bike; a 2015 Trek Emonda ALR, complete with rim brakes, external cables and round handlebars.

By keeping that baseline bike unchanged between each of our testing days, we're able to quantify the 'delta' – or difference – irrespective of the atmospheric conditions that can affect the results.

And this, in turn, allows us to compare the delta of the S-Works Tarmac SL8, the Factor ONE, and the Seka Spear, despite testing them all on separate days.

To be a tease, we also tested a handful of other bikes on the same day, including the Cinelli Aeroscoop and X-Lab AD9 that we've already covered in standalone dep dives, the Enve Melee, a Felt we can't tell you about yet, and a second bike whose brand name we're not even allowed to disclose. Those will be published in the coming weeks.

To add to the confidence and completeness of our results, we test each bike in three different ways:

• Bike-only: This offers repeatability and accuracy. You know the results here are a result of the bike, as there's nothing else in the wind tunnel, but you lose some of the realism, given bikes can't actually pedal themselves.
• With-rider: This adds the realism missing above, but with reduced accuracy, because the ability for a real human – me, in this case – to hold an exacting position repeatedly is hard work. We take steps to mitigate, but the variance is still approximately 2-3 watts higher than a bike-only test.
• Bike-only, standardised wheels: This allows an extra test to quantify whether the bike's stock wheels are where the aero benefits actually lie, how well a frame works with another pair of wheels, and quantify the difference between framesets alone, rather than the complete package as sold by each brand.

Each setup was tested at seven different 'yaw angles' – the angle of the wind, to you and me – which spanned from -15° through to +15° in five-degree increments.

We tested at 40km/h, which is the sort of average speed you'll see in an amateur road race, road bike time trials, and longer breakaway days in the pro peloton. For bike-only tests, we ensured the wheels were spinning at the same speed, and for with-rider bike tests, we chose the closest optimal gear and ensured pedalling stayed at 90rpm.

For bike-only tests, we measured for 10 seconds per yaw, while the rider-on tests were captured for longer – 30 seconds – to ensure the results weren't skewed by any accidental movements by the rider.

The wind tunnel, as ever, was tared - like a zero offset on your kitchen scales - before each test.

As per the previous tests, each bike was a 56cm or equivalent, and adjusted to fit as closely as possible to the baseline Trek Emonda ALR, which in turn is fitted to the rider, our Associate Editor, Josh.

With different handlebar widths, different flares of the same width, and then the various geometries of each bike, the position does differ slightly across bikes. The differences here are small enough that we're not concerned that they affect results unfairly.

Each bike was fitted with a 25mm Continental GP5000 S TR front tyre, to ensure the result wasn't unfairly skewed by differences in tyre size. For the test with the Enve wheels, we ran a pair of 28mm GP5000 S TR.

Everything else you can think of was standardised too, including what Josh wore, bottles and cages, the computer mounts, and saddles.

With saddles, we were kindly sent a box full of Ergon SR Women Team saddles, which have exactly the same upper – both in shape and material – for both round and carbon railed versions, meaning we could standardise across all levels of bike today and in future.

A few caveats

We ran multiple repeats of the Trek Emonda ALR to quantify what our repeatability was on the day, which in turn gave us a confidence margin that is applied to the results below.

That margin is as follows:

Our error margin differed slightly on each testing day, which is why the data for some bikes have bigger variances than others when graphed out below.

This and all of our other tests are independent, impartial, and entirely unbiased, and we hire the wind tunnel at the normal commercial rate.

A fair, honest and unbiased protocol is essential to the success of these tests. Even if we could maintain impartiality, you wouldn't trust the result if it said it was sponsored by Seka, so even though we've had multiple requests from various brands (not including Seka, for what it's worth), we've rejected them.

Importantly, the data below is merely the result of our day of testing, not the final word on whether the Seka Spear is a good, bad, fast or slow bike.

We hire a highly respected facility and test as accurately as we can using our set protocol, but we understand that you may see different results under different testing conditions or using different protocols, such as faster test speeds, using mannequins, or testing at different yaw angles.

We also understand that this is just one piece of a much bigger puzzle. Countless other metrics make up a bike's performance, such as stiffness, weight and compliance, and unless you're a pro cyclist, you should also consider how easy it is to live with, service, and how easy the brand is to do business with, in the case of an issue down the road.

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The results

Starting with the raw CdA data for each yaw point. This doesn't necessarily give us much to go on in terms of comparing to the industry's competitors, but it's really interesting to see how a bike handles the wind. Some really struggle when the wind angle grows (to become more of a crosswind) and others actually get faster in crosswinds.

For this graph, we have the fastest frame we tested, the Factor ONE, along with the baseline 'slow' bike, the Trek Emonda ALR.

Impressively, here, we can see that the Seka Spear is very close to the pattern of performance of the Factor ONE. Although not delivering quite the same sail effect in crosswinds, the Spear's performance at -15º and 15º YAW is actually better than at -10º and 10º.

This is particularly interesting given that the shallow frame tubing of the Seka and the roundness of some parts of it are generally not conducive to this sail effect. It may be, then, that the Wind Eye is working well here to reduce turbulence coming off the rear of the bike and wheels.

Adding a rider to the equation just makes things even better for the Seka Spear. We can see at -15º, 0º, 5º and 10˚ the Factor ONE prevails as the fastest. However, at -10º, -5º, and 15º YAW, the Seka Spear is actually the faster machine.

That lower 0º (dead headwind) performance is likely due to the profiling of the Seka versus the Factor. The Factor uses far deeper and narrower tube shapes that work very well when a rider is present, and at higher speeds where yaw angles are lower. However, add some pistons on either side of the frame in the form of legs, and the way the air flows around the bike changes dramatically.

This is most prevalent at the rear of the bike, as legs make the airflow very messy. The Wind Eye may be working here to direct some of that turbulent air and redirect the flow off the back of the bike/rider to result in a lower total drag. It is obviously hard to say without being able to see the flow of the air.

Given that the Seka Spear actually outperformed the aero bike standard bearer at certain wind angles, just how does it compare against the entire field?

Interestingly, with just the bike, the Seka Spear does not perform that well. It is 31.7w faster than the Emonda, but 8.58w behind the Factor ONE. With the margin of error, though, it could climb one place higher at nearly the same wattage saving as the S-Works Tarmac SL8.

But bike-only performance is somewhat limited in the real world, given bikes famously do not ride themselves. It gets very interesting when we place a rider on the bike.

When a rider is aboard the Spear, it jumps up the table all the way to fourth fastest, ahead of the SL8, the Factor Ostro VAM 2, and the Colnago Y1RS.

This represents a saving of 24.48w over the Emonda, and just 3.09w behind the Cervélo S5 (2025). The margin for error could even see it take the top spot on the table. At worst, it could still be sitting in the top-third of the table around the cluster of bikes that were 20-21w faster than the Emonda.

It's quite impressive to see this jump up the table from adding a rider, and it looks to be the biggest mover between frame-only and rider-on testing.

To see if any of that performance was down to the No.6 wheels supplied, we also tested all the bikes as frame-only but with a set of ENVE SES 4.5 wheels, fitted with 28mm tyres.

This protocol was only added in 2025, so we don't have data for our 2024 cohort of bikes, but it makes very little difference to the Seka Spear, meaning it sits in a similar position behind the Factor, Cervélo, Dare, Colnago, Ridley and others.

Adding the ENVE wheels interestingly slowed the Seka Spear down, with a 1.24w drag increase over the No.6 wheels tested with the frame.

It still sits lower down the table as a frame-only option, but as we know, the with-rider performance jumps it well up to the top league. It's not a large difference between the wheels, and although the No.6 wheels are by no means 'cheap', they do appear to represent impressive performance for the cost, given they outperformed the ENVE wheels on this frame.

We've had far bigger differences in performance by changing to the ENVE wheels, and the depths of the two are fairly similar with a 50/58mm front/rear paring for the No.6 versus the ENVE 50/56mm front/rear. Nonetheless, it is impressive to see that the supplied wheels were actually faster than one of the faster offerings at this depth from our wind tunnel test of wheels.

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Conclusions

The Seka Spear has been something of a surprise package in this testing. It is an all-rounder bike, rather than an aero-specific model like the Factor ONE or Van Rysel RCR-F. But it performs better than several of the dedicated aero bikes in our testing when a rider is present.

Part of this may be down to Wind Eye assisting greatly in limiting the turbulence that is created by a rider's legs moving on either side of the bike. We've seen that adding a rider relatively reduces the aero performance gap between the Emonda and the aero bikes. A means of reducing the turbulence incurred by a rider is a good way to ensure greater real-world performance.

It's especially impressive given the light weight of this bike; just 6.88kg with relatively deep-section wheels. It is competitive with the likes of the S-Works Tarmac SL8, yet outperforms it in the wind tunnel. It also has a few practical features, such as the covers for the drop-outs, integrated bottle cages that can accept any bottles, and built-in compliance for added comfort.

It is also worth considering that at speeds higher than 40kph, which a lot of amateur races are raced at nowadays, frames can perform differently. The Factor ONE, for example, has been designed for 45+ kph in mind. Additionally, at higher speeds, the yaw angle experienced will be lower. But that Wind Eye will still likely assist in performance with a rider present, as it was still beneficial at 0˚ YAW.

What this testing does show is that from an aero perspective, if riders want a bike that will perform well with a rider present, then the Seka Spear is well worth considering. The fact that it is quite a lightweight model as well just adds to the total capabilities of this bike. How it rides on the road remains to be seen for us.

Given that the Spear clearly has the Tarmac SL8 in its crosshairs, let's do a direct comparison. The machines are roughly similar in weight, and while the Tarmac is faster bike-only, with a rider, the Seka seems to have the beating of it. The Spear is also a good deal cheaper, with a price difference for a frameset of £940 ($1,287) at the 'Specialized' tier, and £2,191 ($2,999) at the S-Works tier, and you get to pick your cockpit from a range of sizes, which you don't with the Tarmac.

Chinese bikes are fast becoming the overriding story of the last few years, but until recently, there hasn't been the performance reputation to back up the bargains. Now, though, the Spear is a genuine contender not just for the best Chinese all-rounder, but the best all-rounder full stop.

This, it must be caveated with, is only based on wind tunnel results, and has no bearing on what it's actually like to ride in the real world, how easy it is to live with, or whether you'd be more comfortable buying a bike from a brand (Specialized or otherwise) with a comprehensive dealer network in your country.