With Magma, Contador and Basso, have designed their ultimate road race bike
(Image credit: Aurum)
Aurum is a new frameset brand featuring a collaboration of Alberto Contador and Ivan Basso, who between them share nine Grand Tour victories.
The first Aurum product is Magma, with both Contador and Basso extensively involved in its design process of the frameset.
Although these Grand Tour riders racing days may be in the past, Contador and Basso desired to make an excellent UCI race-legal weapon in line with the best road bikes. Drawing from their combined knowledge and wealth of experience to create what they see as the perfect road racing bike.
With Magma, design director, Iñigo Gisbert, was challenged to produce a frame that is both stiff and compliant. “The Magma project has been exciting and demanding in equal parts. We are exhilarated with the final product. Working with Alberto and Ivan is fantastic for all the knowledge and experience they bring.”
Leveraging all the benefits of composite structures, the Magma has fibres orientated in different directions, according to their position on the frame. This allows for adequate vertical compliance, enabling the calibre of road surface damping that reduces rider fatigue on those epic weekend rides.
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Aurum's Magma has 30mm of tyre clearance and classic lines (Image credit: Aurum)
A tidy cable port sits at the top of Magma's head tube(Image credit: Aurum)
Elegant and aero
Aerodynamic principles guided the Magma design team to adopt different tube profiles for various frame sizes.
Material has been removed where possible, to best optimize the bike aerodynamics, without sacrificing its torsional stiffness. An example of this, is Magma’s seat tube, with a truncated kink towards the bottom. Anchoring the bike's torsional stiffness is an oversized BB386 EVO standard bottom bracket.
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The 12mm stealth thru-axles, front and rear, assist in reducing Magma’s overall drag coefficient, as does the custom wedge, which houses a 27.2mm seat post.
As one would expect from a boutique brand, Aurum uses different fork offsets for different sizes of its Magma. Recognising that fork trail is a crucial - yet often ignored - geometry value in overall frame design, Aurum builds its two smallest Magmas with 50mm offset forks, whilst the four larger sizes all use a 44mm offset.
Beyond its striking appearance and committed aerodynamics, the Magma is compatible with both electronic and mechanical road bike groupsets.
Available in six frame sizes (50-, 52-, 54-,56-, 58- and 61), Aurum quotes a reference weight of 805g for its Magma frame, using a ’54.
Key geometry numbers include stack heights of between 505mm and 615mm, whilst the frame range has a 71.6-degree head angle on its smallest sizes and 73-degree through the rest.
Pricing for the frameset starts at €4,099, with premium a Shimano/Enve build at €9,799, SRAM/Zipp at €9,999 and a Lightweight components edition, positioned at €11,999. The Magma frameset is available directly from Aurum via its website, aurumbikes.com
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Lance Branquinho is a Namibian born media professional, with 15-years of experience in technology and engineering journalism covering anything with wheels. Being from Namibia, he knows a good gravel road when he sees one, and he has raced some of Africa’s best-known mountain bike stage races, such as Wines2Wales and Berg&Bush.
