Wind tunnel tested: Can the four-year-old Enve Melee stay relevant in a hyper-aero landscape?

Until 2026, the ENVE Melee was the bike of choice for the TotalEnergies Pro Cycling Team. After moving on from custom geometry frames, ENVE released the Melee in the summer of 2022 as a do-it-all, all-rounder bike.

Indeed, it shares a lot of similarities with other similarly designed frames such as the Specialized Tarmac SL8, Cannondale SuperSix, and Factor Ostro VAM. These include the now standard integrated front end set-ups, dropped seat stays, and kamm-tailed tubing for reduced weight and increase virtual aerofoils.

The Melee lacks some of the more outlandish features that have crept into WorldTour bike design over recent years, but that hasn't stopped bikes like the Tarmac SL8 and Wilier Filante SLR from being impressively fast performers when pitched against far more radical looking bikes such as the Colnago Y1RS.

The ENVE Melee stands out a bit from the rest of the crop of current aero bikes in that it does not have quite as aggressive a stack height. Indeed the 2025 Van Rysel RCR-F dropped the stack height even further than the 2024 RCR, and it is a fairly substantial 15mm lower than the Melee in a size 56cm. For reference a 56cm SL8 is also 6mm lower, the same as the Colnago Y1Rs and Cervélo S5, while the SuperSix is 4mm higher. Marginal differences, but the Melee certainly sits on the higher end when it comes to race bike stack height.

However, we are seeing more and more WorldTour pros abandoning slammed front end setups in favours of more stack to enable a position where they can ride with their forearms horizontal for extended periods. That might actually help the Melee's cause for a bike that allows better maintenance of aero position in the real world.

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Back when we reviewed the ENVE Melee, the thing that impressed us was how it felt as lively as a lightweight racer, and as fast on the flats as other aero bikes. Of course this was a few aero bike generations ago, and 'feeling' aero doesn't always mean it is aero.

35mm tyre clearance remains, as does an integrated two-piece set-up to allow for changes in geometry that won't cost upwards of £500 and has far more variety than most one-piece offerings. There are also mudguard mounts to allow this to be an all-year all-seasons aero bike. There is of course more to a bike than just aero performance, but for the purposes of this article however, that's the main point we are going to focus on.

To find out how this bike performs, we took it to the wind tunnel to see how it stacked up (sorry for that pun) against the competition. For this testing, the positions were kept consistent between frames and geometry as equalised as best we could given the one-piece setups that many of the bikes came with. Can it compete with the S-Works SL8, or the alien looking Factor ONE? Read on to find out.

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 ENVE Melee 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 ENVE Melee, despite testing them all on separate days.

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 rider-on 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 ENVE, so even though we've had multiple requests from various brands, we've rejected them.

Importantly, the data below is merely the result of our day of testing, not the final word on whether the ENVE Melee 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. There are countless other metrics that 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.

Using the baseline Emonda ALR as our example of a 'bad' aerodynamic bike, and the Factor ONE as the benchmark 'good' bike, you can see how the ENVE Melee compares. The 'V' shape of the Emonda graph basically means that the further the wind comes from the side, the higher the aero drag. This is quite natural given more of the bike is in the line of the wind. The Factor harnesses the wind to 'sail', and actually gets faster at 10° and 15°, in part due to the profiling of the frame tubes.

The ENVE Melee doesn't have a sail impact such as the Factor does, as when the wind angle increases the Melee gets slower whereas the Factor gets faster. It's not quite as pronounced a V as the Emonda, but it is more exaggerated than aero frames such as the X-Lab AD9.

Adding a rider reduces this sail effect significantly. This is the same as on the Factor ONE, but at angles such as 15 or -15˚ the Melee actually gets rather close in performance to the Emonda. There is a tiny bit of crossover with the ONE at 10˚ and closer at -10˚, but these are relative outliers.

The Emonda has a fairly linear increase in drag across the CdA ranges out from 0˚, while the Melee gets a sharper angle the higher the yaw. This may be due to the frame shapes. The Emonda is more circular tubed, so some consistency across yaw angles makes sense over the majority of the frame body. The ENVE Melee meanwhile relies on virtual aerofoil shapes thanks to the kamm-tailed tubing (D-shaped). As the wind comes from the side, this virtual aerofoil is limited, and a full aerofoil shape such as on some tubes of the Factor ONE can perform relatively better.

The Melee is certainly more of what you would describe as an all-rounder in its design and style, rather than an out and out aero bike like the Factor ONE, Van Rysel RCR-F, or Ridley Noah Fast 3.0, certainly when it comes to looks. But looks don't tell the whole story, so let's see how the Melee compares against the rest of the field.

Looking at the bike only tests, the ENVE Melee sits down towards the bottom coming in at fourth last. Even with the margin for error, it still doesn't move up even a single place on our chart staying behind the old Merida Reacto 9000 (not the new one that' just been released).

It still represents a saving of 25.61w over the Emonda, but is only 1.49w off the bottom of the table, and a whopping 14.67w behind the Factor ONE.

But as we know from our other tests, putting a rider on the bike can have a drastic impact on the total system drag, and can change the order of the table somewhat.

Adding a rider onto the bike doesn't actually change the position of the ENVE Melee on the table, still occupying fourth from last. The only change being which bikes flank either side of it with the old Cannondale SuperSix Evo 4 and Look Blade RS 795 sitting above and below respectively. However the margin for error with a rider on is larger, so at best the Melee might be around the Van Rysel RCR Pro or Pinarello Dogma F in performance.

This results in a 17.74w saving over the Emonda, but just under 10w slower than the Cervélo S5 (2025) which led the way on this test by a whisker. The numbers are far closer when the rider is taken into account alongside the frame, showing how dependant some of the claimed performance is on not necessarily having a rider present with large moving pistons either side of the frame.

It does unfortunately show the ENVE Melee to be somewhat of a slower performer relative to most of the other aero bikes on test. But of course it is still significantly faster than our baseline model, making up two thirds of the difference between that and the fastest bike on test. Considering it is four years old now, the fact that is still beating some older all-rounders and even some brand new aero bikes like the Cinelli Aeroscoop shows it's still no slouch.

However, most of the bikes on test came with different wheels, so to standardise that, let's see what happened when we fitted out ENVE 4.5 wheelset to the ENVE Melee frame.

This protocol was only added in 2025, so we don't have data for our 2024 cohort of bikes. The change does have a reasonable impact on the Melee performance, but it still sits in a similar position behind the table.

When we tested the ENVE Melee as standard, it was actually tested with ENVE 4.5 wheels already. However, it was tested with 25mm tyres, while the baseline set we had used 28mm tyres.

This likely explains the performance gain found when fitting the standardised wheels, as the ENVE 4.5s feature a very wide internal and external width. This means that likely the wheels perform better with tyres that 'fill the gap' so to speak. In fact with the standardised wheels and 28mm tyres, the bike performed 1.31w faster than with the 25mm tyres. It was the fourth largest positive responder to changing the wheels.

Conclusions

We have already reviewed the ENVE Melee back in 2022, and at the time it was a bike that we praised for the light weight, agile ride qualities, and fast sensations to match other aero bikes of the time.

The problem however is that 4 years is a literal life time in the lifecycle of a bike nowadays. Back then the Specialized Tarmac SL7 had only been around for a year, whereas now there is talk of the Tarmac SL8 being superseded in 2026.

Since that period, bikes have become more integrated with specific bottles and bottle cages, taken on novel and unique looking cockpit solutions, and added a host of specific aero features to the frames that look outlandish by the standards of 2022.

This is likely what holds back the ENVE Melee in terms of aerodynamic performance, it is an aero bike that is now behind the aero bike curve. It will also not be present in the professional peloton as Total Energies have switched to Cube bikes.

There is of course more to a bike than just aero performance, and the Melee is the only bike we tested out of the aero bikes with mudguard mounts, and it accommodates 35mm tyres. It is subjectively a good bike as we have tested, and likely a far more appropriate one for the masses with this geometry and clearance. However, it is not the most aerodynamic, which is the focus of this test. For those looking for maximal aerodynamic performance, there are clearly faster options. But as an upgrade to something like a Trek Emonda ALR, it still represents a huge jump up in performance.