Is Felt back? We wind tunnel tested the new 'Nexar' aero bike to see how it stacks up

Felt Bicycles has been somewhat out of the public eye for some time. Over the past half-decade, it has seen multiple changes in ownership and rounds of internal restructuring, and its flagship aero bike which launched in 2020, the AR, has grown long in the tooth over the subsequent six years.

In late 2025, its then-Austrian parent company sold the brand to minority shareholders based in Spain, and what is likely to be the new era of Felt Bicycles is launching with the Nexar.

Back in December, Cyclingnews was given exclusive access to the bike for the latest round of wind tunnel aero bike testing. Like all of our recent bike tests, we put it through our comparative protocol, allowing us to benchmark it against not only the bikes tested on the same day, but all other bikes we've tested over the past two years.

To find out how the new Felt Nexar compares against the likes of the Colnago Y1Rs, the Cervélo S5, the Specialized Tarmac SL8 and dozens more, read on.

Felt Nexar: What's new?

The Felt Nexar represents a huge step up in aero bike design from the previous AR range. The previous bike featured semi-integrated cable routing, high and narrow seat stays, and two-piece bar and stem combinations.

The Nexar follows a far more modern approach to making an aero race bike.

Firstly, it reworks the front end quite drastically with a one-piece bar and stem combination for fully internal cable routing, keeping on trend with pretty much every modern aero road bike design.

A lot of the tubes have been slimmed down by comparison to the AR range, although many of the kamm-tailed shapes remain. The most drastic difference is the seat tube, which curves tightly around the rear wheel, and the very slimmed-down seat post, which drops the vibration-damping centre architecture.

The Nexar almost looks like a more angular and squared-off Cervélo S5 in design, especially at the rear. The tube profiles are not excessively deep like the Ridley Noah Fast 3.0 or Van Rysel RCR-F, it's more similar to the likes of the X-Lab AD9.

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Small winglets on the rear of the forks are present, as they are on the X-Lab and the Pinarello Dogma F. There aren't as many 'trick' design elements as some other bikes, such as integrated bottle cages like the Wilier Filante SLR ID2, split seatstays like on the Seka Spear or bayonet head tube like the Factor One or the Colnago Y1Rs.

It's all fairly conventional by the outlandish aero bike standards. The head tube is nicely tapered with defined lines, while the fork and seat stay widths are more standard, unlike the Factor One.

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We've not tested the previous Felt AR aero bike, but there are plenty of design elements that suggest it should be a good amount faster. One interesting feature, as can be seen by how far back we had to mount the saddle, is the very upright seat tube and post. This allows the option for a very far forward saddle position, more akin to a time trial bike. This geometry shift forward is something we are seeing more of in pro-spec aero road frames.

But how does it perform against the other top-end halo aero bikes that we have put in the wind tunnel?

Let's 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 superbikes 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 Felt Nexar 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 conditions on each day.

And this, in turn, allows us to compare the delta of the S-Works Tarmac SL8, the Factor One, and the Felt Nexar, 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 – our Associate Editor Josh, in this case – to hold an exacting position repeatedly is hard work. We take steps to mitigate, but the accuracy is still approximately 2-3 watts worse than a bike-only test.
• Bike-only, standardised wheels: This allows an extra test to quantify whether the bike's frame is where the aero benefits actually lie or whether the stock wheels are helping, 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 direction 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 and entirely unbiased. Impartiality is essential to the success of these tests, so even though we'd never sell out the results, our readers wouldn't trust the data if it said it was sponsored by Felt.

To prove our commitment to this, Felt offered to pay for the hire of the wind tunnel for this day of testing, but we refused.

Importantly, while we believe in the veracity of our data, it is merely the result of one day of testing, not the final word on whether the Felt Nexar 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, different riders, 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.

Our in-depth Felt Nexar review seeks to answer these questions and provide a more rounded analysis of the bike.

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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.

Comparing the Felt Nexar against our benchmark 'bad' aerodynamic bike in the Trek Emonda ALR, and our 'good' aerodynamic bike in the Factor One, the Felt performs impressively well.

On the graph, we can see that as a frame-only, it performs very close to the Factor. At 0° Yaw is where the two are closest, with the Factor experiencing more of a sail effect. There is some element of that as the Nexar is better at 15° Yaw than 10°, but still fastest at 0°.

However, things changed drastically once a rider is added onto the bike. At 0° Yaw the Felt Nexar is quite a way further from the performance of the Factor One, and the sail effect diminishes as it becomes ever slower at higher Yaw angles.

A potential factor in this might be some of that approach of making a bike aero at the front and lightweight at the rear. We have seen with some bikes that this can make frame-only performance more solid, but rider-on performance then drops relatively.

Bikes such as the Seka Spear use design elements to address this and improve airflow off the back of the bike, to the extent that that particular bike went from middling frame-only performance to high-performer with a rider.

But how does the Felt Nexar compare to the other bikes that we had on test?

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When we look at the bike-only testing, the Nexar is the fastest of the late 2025 cohort of bikes that we tested, and up there with the top quarter of all the bikes we tested overall.

In total, it represents a 36.59w saving over the Emonda, and the margin for error means it could be as fast as the top-6, where the range is rather small. Indeed, it's only 3.69w off the Factor at 40km/h, a very small amount.

Of course, frame-only performance is interesting to see, but rider-on performance is what matters for us when we actually ride the bike.

Unfortunately, that gap in performance we saw relative to the Factor One represents a big drop down the table for the Felt Nexar. It drops down to the bottom third overall in our testing, at 20.21w faster than the Trek Emonda, and 7.36w behind the Cervélo S5 (2025).

Taking the margin of error into account, which is larger with the rider present, it could perform as well as the Colnago Y1RS in 5th place overall, or be down as far as third from the bottom.

It does at least sit within a rather large cluster of bikes that all perform around ~20w faster than the Trek Emonda. This covers the Argon 18 Nitrogen Pro at 20.03w faster, all the way up to the Pinarello Dogma F at 20.95w faster.

A factor to consider, though are the wheels supplied with the bike. Not all bikes were supplied with the same depth wheels, or widths, or even tyres, which all impact performance. To account for this, we also did frame-only testing with a control set of ENVE 4.5 wheels and 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 Felt Nexar, meaning it sits in a similar position behind the Factor, Cervélo, Dare, Colnago, Ridley and others.

Swapping out the supplied wheels to the ENVE 4.5, the Felt actually performed significantly worse.

There was a 2.79w increase in drag when switching to the ENVE wheels. Interestingly, the Vision Metron 60 SL (RS version supplied here) did test well in our wheel testing protocol, and are deeper than the ENVE 4.5 that they replaced.

We saw this trend on a few wheels, where switching to the ENVEs meant going shallower, and therefore often adding to the drag. The inverse was also present when the ENVEs represented an increase in wheel depth, and reduced drag.

There is also a consideration that different wheels work better with different frames, such is the nuance and complexity of aerodynamic performance.

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Conclusions

Of course, aero testing is just that, assessing the drag of a bike in these specific conditions. It doesn't take into account ride feel, handling, or weight. But it does have a tangible impact on overall performance, be that a long-distance sportive or the Saturday fast group ride.

We have yet to put the Felt Nexar through its paces on the road, but in terms of aerodynamic performance, it is more of a solid performer than a class leader.

It does sit right in the cluster of aero road bikes in the rider-on test, though. That means a single watt one way or another can move it from the bottom third to the top third, such is the tightness with which these bikes are grouped.

It is also more of an aero bike with lightweight considerations, rather than an aero-at-all-expense like some of its competitors.

I do think in terms of design elements, some areas have been somewhat approached from a playing it safe standing. Save for the odd outlier, integrated bottles or cages have tended to perform well, as have specific design elements to account for airflow off the back of the bike from messy turbulence caused by legs. That has certainly been the case for the Seka Spear, Colnago Y1Rs, Wilier Filante SLR, and Factor One.

But the Felt Nexar is still a solidly performing aero bike. If we take out the Cervélo and Factor from the top of the charts, the Felt is just 4.3w behind, and a margin of error could see that vanish to just 0.85w difference. But then we have to consider that the supplied Vision test wheels were faster than both the standardised ENVE wheels, and quite a few of the wheels supplied with frames that still outperformed it.

It's certainly not the most standout aero performer, but it is decent. Seeing how it performs out on the road will be an interesting comparison though, and if you've not already, check out Will Jones' in-depth Felt Nexar review.