Wind tunnel tested: How fast is the Colnago Y1Rs?

It's a bike that has been the first across the finish line in countless races throughout the 2025 season, and one that's contributed to the most successful WorldTour team campaign ever, with Team UAE Team Emirates-XRG. The Colnago Y1Rs has made quite a statement in its sophomore year.

Looking at the wins per bike, the Colnago Y1Rs has been the dominant force in the men’s field, thanks in large part, of course, to Tadej Pogačar. It's even more impressive considering that many of Colnago's wins before May came from the V4RS (and latterly the V5Rs). Tadej Pogacar’s Tour of Flanders victory and Isaac del Toro’s Giro d’Italia stage win serve as prime examples.

After that, and with the Spring Classics out of the way, it was raced almost exclusively, with the V5Rs confined to the sidelines, especially in the men's peloton. The Y1Rs quickly became the dominant winning machine across both men's and women's fields, especially with modifications such as the stripping back of the Y1Rs' paint, used to great effect by Pogačar.

We’ve already reviewed the bike out on the roads, but subjective measures can only tell you so much. To get a real understanding of the nuance behind the bike's performance, we took it to the Silverstone Sports Engineering Hub wind tunnel alongside 11 competitors, to put it under the microscope and extract some objective data about the Italian brand's flagship aero machine.

You can read the full, in-depth writeup from that test in our aero bike wind tunnel shootout, but here we're going to focus in on one bike, to see how it compares to its closest competitors.

The test

To test, we used the bike in its off-the-shelf specification, but with a couple of key non-variables to help make data between bikes more consistent. You can read the full, comprehensive test details in the main write-up linked above, but for this article, I've summarised the process below.

We tested in three conditions: bike-only, bike with rider, and bike-only with Enve SES 4.5 wheels. The bike had a 56cm frame, while the geometry was matched up as identically as possible to other bikes we tested. Similarly, a 25mm Continental GP5000 S TR front tyre was used for every single test due to the bias given to the front tyre and impact on drag as the first point of contact for the airflow.

The inner tube's valve length and tyre pressure were also not altered, and the standardised Enve wheel testing used 28mm GP5000 S TR tyres instead of the 25mm option. Elite Vico Carbon bottle cages with Elite Fly bottles were used, except in instances where a bike was designed for - and is sold with - integrated bottle cages.

No computer mounts were used, while the rider test kit remained consistent across all testing. The wind tunnel also neatly creates an 'Edge' or a ghost outline of a rider to ensure the same rider position is held from test to test.

Each test was conducted at 40km/h, representative of a faster pace for amateur riders, with yaw angles of -15°, -10°, -5°, 0°, 5°, 10° and 15°. For bike-only tests, we captured for 10 seconds per run, and for bike-and-rider tests, 30 seconds per run at a pedalling cadence of 90 RPM.

Another note is that the confidence and margin for error on tests have also been calculated as follows:

So, how did the Colnago Y1Rs fare in this test?

The results

In the graph above, the x axis shows the yaw angle, which is effectively the direction from which the wind is hitting you, and the y axis shows CdA, or Coefficient of drag x Area, which is a measurement of how aerodynamic something is, quantified in metres squared.

You can see in the graph that there is a clear distinction between the baseline Trek Emonda ALR and the aero bikes. The Colnago Y1Rs sits towards the lower end (meaning lower drag) of these aero bikes.

Taking the data and showing it individually, we can see that as a bike-only test, the Colnago Y1Rs comes in with a CdA of 0.0786m², with most other aero bikes coming in between 0.075 and 0.090m².

With that CdA of 0.0786m², this means the power to move the bike (frame only) at 40kph would be 64.66w. For comparison, the still-unreleased Factor prototype would take 61.51w and the Cervélo S5 of Pogačar's rival, Jonas Vingegaard, took 65.06w. Admittedly, bikes can't pedal themselves without a rider, but for a comparative test that assumes the rider is equal across both bikes, these are pretty close margins.

We'll move onto bike-with-rider testing next.

Next, we have the bike with the rider. Again, the Colnago Y1Rs scores well here, especially at the higher yaw angles. For real-world road riding, this is a good sign as yaw angles are more variable, as well as during bunch riding. The aforementioned Factor and Cervélo are other strong performers here.

On average, here the Cervélo actually wins out, just ahead of the Factor Prototype. Colnago comes in just behind those two, in third, with a CdA of 0.3363m².

In terms of power to move at 40km/h, this comes out at 276.78w for the Colnago Y1Rs, while the only bikes to perform better, the Factor and Cervélo, take 273.17 and 273.12w respectively. The Bianchi Oltre RC, for comparison, took 285.24w.

Interestingly, when we standardise the wheels, the results become quite different, as we'll get to in the table below. For now though, it's interesting to see how some bikes create significantly more drag at higher yaw angles (-15° or +15°) than at 0°, visible here with a 'V' shaped line, whereas the Y1Rs and the Factor actually generate less at those higher yaw angles. This is an effect known as 'sailing', essentially harnessing sidewinds for forward propulsion.

The Factor still wins, but the Dare Velocity Ace-AFO jumps up the table and the Cervélo S5 drops down.

The Colnago Y1Rs still performs well, in all likelihood because it was designed with the Enve SES 4.5 wheels that Team UAE Emirates-XRG use, rather than the Vision SC45 wheels it's sold with (as per the above tested configuration, albeit there is the option to spec Enve wheels via certain stores).

Meanwhile, the Cervélo was designed using the well renowned Reserve Wheels, so a drop in performance from changing wheelsets there is not unexpected. Overall, the top of the table is still close, though, with the Factor requiring 62.65w, the Dare Velocity Ace 64.03w, and the Colnago 64.14w.

When we look at the watts saved against the Trek Emonda ALR, the Colnago Y1Rs, as a frame alone, is a massive 37.13w faster.

With a rider, this changes to 23.91w, which is still a very large saving at 40km/h. The Cervélo S5 and Factor Prototype save around 27.5w each over the baseline bike.

When we combine this data with our previous aero bike test as well, we can see that market staples such as the Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL8 are not far behind, saving 22.67w over the Trek in the rider-on-bike test, so within a watt or so of the Colnago. Impressive given the lightweight focus of that bike.

How does it compare?

We can see from this testing that the Colnago Y1Rs is an impressive performer in our wind tunnel test. It consistently performs alongside the radical Factor Prototype aero bike, and the Cervélo S5 of Jonas Vingegaard, Pogačar's long-term rival.

It's hard to truly extrapolate lab data into real-world riding, but a convincing argument in favour of the Colnago Y1Rs is the relatively strong performance at higher wind angles. Out on the road, wind conditions are far more variable than in the wind tunnel, while riding in a bunch also presents more moving air from different directions.

The Silverstone wind tunnel - alongside many others - has also been used very successfully by a lot of brands, teams and athletes to reduce wind tunnel CdA and see an increase in real-world performance as a result.

We also might see different data at different speeds. UK road races, for example, tend to be raced at 42-46kph on average. While riding solo on a bike like this might be between 25 and 35kph, depending on fitness or terrain. But with testing across yaw angles, for long enough to capture reliable data, we'd have needed several days to conduct the same test at multiple speeds, hence the use of 40km/h, which is also close to the average Tour de France speeds over the past decade.

That's where weight comes in, as this is a constant variable regardless of speed. On the scales, the Colnago Y1Rs came in at 7.68kg, not quite as featherweight as the paint-stripped and Enve SES 4.5 Pro-equipped bike of Pogačar would be. Indeed, the Cervélo S5 came in at 7.46kg but without a front derailleur and higher-end base-spec wheels. Factor was most impressive at 7.35kg, but this is a fully paint-stripped bare carbon model. When we tested the Specialized S-Works Tarmac SL8, it was a svelte 7.18kg.

And to compare the aforementioned quartet on price, the Cervélo S5 is a top-tier WorldTour specification for £12,000, with the Specialized also retailing at £12,000, and the Factor has yet to be publicly launched. Our test setup for the Colnago Y1Rs came in at £12,600, but for the similar professional specification with Enve wheels, it is £15,739.

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Conclusion

When it comes to out-and-out aero performance, the Colnago Y1Rs is an impressive performer, sitting perfectly within the upper echelons of aero road bike performance.

It does this both as a bike alone and with a rider present, and the performance only improves once you equip some similarly fancy wheels to the bike.

However, this performance comes at a cost, and one that exceeds several others on this list by a good few thousand pounds. It is also not the most featherweight in this specification, and although upgrading the wheels will improve that, it brings it more in line with competitors, for still a very high cost.

It is not a bike that represents good value. But as we found in our review, it is an impressive machine, potentially even the best bike Colnago has made, and like its results in the WorldTour, its results here in the wind tunnel back up the credentials as a highly capable race bike.