A closer look at the brand new Ridley: Caleb Ewan's bike at the Tour de France

Cyclingnews is on the ground at the Tour de France and we've managed to snap some shots of Caleb Ewan's all-new Ridley race bike ahead of the Grand Depart in Bilbao. 

It appears to be the same Ridley prototype we first spotted at the Critérium du Dauphiné, but now we've managed to get up close and personal with the bike in order to try and find out more information about this new, still-to-be-launched model from the Belgian brand. 

Its name remains unconfirmed, and somewhat unhelpfully, the frame is marked with a UCI 'Prototype' sticker. It is evidently different in its frame design from the Noah Fast that Ewan typically races, but we're still in the dark as to exactly what this model will be called, or indeed when it will be made official. 

Aside from the different-looking frame, the equipment and setup look similar to what Ewan has been using for the 2023 season so far, as we'll get into below. We've also rounded up a host of Ewan's bikes from his career to date, stretching back to the rim-brake-equipped Scott Foil from 2014. 

Caleb Ewan's bike for the 2023 Tour de France

What size is Caleb Ewan's bike?

At 5ft 5in tall, Caleb Ewan is one of the peloton's shorter riders, and as such his bike is among the smallest of the bunch. 

At face value, his 2023 Noah Fast, shown below from the Tour Down Under, looks exactly like the size XS he rode in 2022, 2021 and 2020, but given we're total nerds here at Cyclingnews, we've spotted a few minute differences that suggest he's recently changed size. 

Given the tighter angle at the head tube, the shorter seat tube, extra seatpost showing and lower seat stays, we believe Ewan has actually gone for a smaller frame in 2023 than he did before. 

In 2020 he was riding a size XS, so we believe he's now aboard the smallest model in the Ridley lineup, an XXS. 

With that said, a typical rider of Ewan's height would be recommended a size S by Ridley, but as is common among professionals, he has sized down.

Ewan is famed for his low, aggressive aerodynamic sprinting position, and the smaller frame – paired with a long stem, which in 2023 looks even more aggressive than before – helps him achieve this. The added benefit of being lighter in weight won't see him complaining either. 

How much does Caleb Ewan's bike weigh?

The Noah Fast is a disc brake equipped aero bike first launched in 2018, and as a result, it's not going to be a featherweight, but the size XXS frame will certainly help. We didn't have scales to hand when weighing his 2023 bike, but we did when we caught up with his bike in 2020 (gallery further below). That bike weighed in at 7.6kg with pedals and bottle cages. 

Given the frame is (mostly) the same, and the weight of wheels and the spec is largely of a similar level, we think it's safe to assume the weight is similar today. 

Given the unreleased nature of the 2023 model, we were forbidden from weighing it, but our fairly-well-attuned guesswork having picked it up and carried it around a car park for the photographs you see above, we'd put it very close to the 6.8kg mark. 

Caleb Ewan's Ridley Noah Fast: Specifications

Here are the specifications from the Noah Fast shown above from the Tour Down Under. Most of the specs remain the same as he transitions onto the new model. Given that, and the fact that we don't know the model name of the new bike, we've kept the specs table below the same as before. We will, of course, update this with new details when the new bike becomes official. 

A history of Caleb Ewan's bikes

Here we’ll take a deeper dive into the Aussie sprinter’s bikes from this year and seasons past pulled from the Cyclingnews archives.

In Ewan’s case, we have galleries of his bikes going all the way back to January 2014, when he was just a 19-year-old ”new name”. 

Caleb Ewan's 2023 Ridley Noah Fast Disc bike: Gallery

Cyclingnews is on the ground at the Tour Down Under ahead of the 2023 WorldTour season opener, and we got up close with the Aussie sprinter's 2023 bike before the racing began. 

Caleb Ewan's 2020 Ridley Noah Fast Disc bike: Gallery

Like in 2023, we were on the ground in Adelaide for the Tour Down Under in 2020 too, and again, we spent some time with Caleb Ewan's bike for the season. That year he went on to win the Schwalbe Classic Criterium on the night before the race, as well as two stages.  

As we've already aluded to, his bike for that season was same-same-but-very-different. It was the same Ridley Noah Fast Disc, but in what looks like a bigger size, with Campagnolo, SRM and tubular tyres. This was the team's first season committed to disc brakes (although they did break that rule on a few hillier stages during that year's Tour de France). 

Most of the team used red bikes for the season, but Ridley allowed Ewan, John Degenkolb, Philippe Gilbert, and Tim Wellens to design their own colours for the season. Only Ewan and Degenkolb - see his Ridley here - managed to take advantage before the calendar was shut down due to Covid. 

Ewan kept things boring understated with this black-and-white colour scheme. 

Caleb Ewan's 2019 Ridley Noah Fast: Gallery

Head back in time another 12 months and you get... more Ridley Noah Fasts. 

But! Remember rim brakes? 

That's right. Caleb Ewan's bike for the 2019 season was a rim brake equipped Noah Fast. Like the 2020 bike, it was equipped with Campagnolo. In these photos shot here in December 2018 show the groupset in its older 11-speed Super Record EPS guise, but if memory serves, by the time racing began he was using the then-unreleased 12-speed version. 

Caleb Ewan's 2018 Scott Foil: Gallery

You need to go back another year to get to the last time Ewan raced on something that wasn't a Ridley. Enter the Scott Foil, the aero bike with one-piece integrated cockpit but external cables, a Shimano R9150 groupset, a Shimano-SRM power meter, Shimano wheels and Continental tubs. 

This marks Ewan's final season with the Australian outfit known at the time as Mitchelton-Scott. 

Caleb Ewan's 2017 Scott Foil: Gallery

Go back another year and even though the team name was different, you get much the same bike. The team was known as Orica-Scott, and the bike is the same Scott Foil in the same colour scheme, but with slightly older Shimano wheels; the C50, tubs of course. 

Shimano had already launched the R9100-series Dura-Ace, but due delivery timings and the logistical difficulty of getting 30-plus bikes to Adelaide, Ewan and his Tour Down Under teammates were forced to use the older R9000 series - the last of Dura-Ace's silver era. 

The SRM-Shimano chainset was there, and the Syncros one-piece bar-stem that should have been fitted was delivered in the wrong size, so they were forced to adapt. 

Caleb Ewan's 2014 Scott Foil: Gallery

Going back even further, this time to 2014, and although he's aboard a Scott Foil, there's not a lot to compare between this and 2017. Ok, so the tiny frame and low position is still a feature, and it's still a Shimano groupset with Shimano tubular wheels, but everything is from a previous model series, including Dura-Ace 7900. 

This very gallery, written by Dave Rome for Cyclingnews (and BikeRadar, since the two were at this point connected entities), opened with the following sentence: "Caleb Ewan may be a new name to many, but he won't be for long." 

You weren't wrong, Dave. At just 19 years of age, Ewan had just ridden to victory at both the U23 Aussie road and crit champs, before finishing 3rd behind only Marcel Kittel and Andre Greipel at the People's Choice Criterium - the race that opens the Tour Down Under week of racing.

The bike, nominally an aero bike, was well equipped for its time, albeit used the shallower 35mm wheels which had already been superseded with faster and deeper options.