New Pinarello gravel bike breaks cover at Unbound, with funky paint jobs, fewer kinks, and unlike everyone else, the tyre clearance appears unchanged

The Unbound new bike launchpad is well and truly up and running, with more new tech on show this week than you can shake a mud-clearing stick at, and now it looks like Pinarello is joining the party. 

Via a handful of its sponsored pro athletes, a new bike, believed to be a replacement for the Grevil F, has been spotted in Emporia ahead of Saturday's Unbound Gravel races.

It marks the fifth new tech find we've spotted after just one day in town, joining an unknown Factor, a new Orbea, a Specialized Diverge, and even a Campagnolo gravel groupset. 

A leak of this manner is often preplanned by a brand's marketing team, but it's not clear whether Pinarello wanted these bikes to be spotted at all. Each has been given a striking paint job and hand-drawn Sharpie pen design, but they are devoid of any Pinarello branding at all. 

Of course, through a combination of athlete association and Pinarello's extensive use of kinked and wavy tube shapes, it's impossible that these bikes could be any other brand. 

The playbook for gravel bike launches in 2025 is seemingly a combination of increased tyre clearance, more attention to aerodynamics, and a consideration toward boosted compliance.

The previous iteration of the Grevil F did most of those things quite well already, though, and its 50mm tyre clearance was already more ample than a lot of the more modern competition. The Cannondale SuperX launched in spring, for example, with just 48mm at the rear. 

So what could Pinarello do to take it to the next step? Cyclingnews managed to stop Axelle Dubau-Prévot – the fast-rising Frenchwoman, who currently sits 10th on the LifeTime Grand Prix leaderboard – with the new bike in downtown Emporia for some photos, so let's dive into what we can see.

The first obvious update is in the position of the seatstay junctions. The previous bike's junctions were almost in line with the top tube, but here they are much lower, not much past the halfway mark between the bottom bracket and where the top tube meets. 

While not always cut and dry, dropped seatstays can offer a twofold benefit of boosting aerodynamics and increasing compliance. If that's what Pinarello was aiming to achieve here, that's two of the new-bike-bingo card checked off already. 

The other big visible difference is in the quantity-or – reduction thereof of wavy and kinked tubes on offer. While the existing Grevil F featured a giant stepdown halfway down the downtube, the downtube here is arrow straight, only stepping down a few millimetres on the trailing edge to enshroud the bottle cage, where there's also the introduction of a small storage door for housing spares. 

The same can be said for the seat stays, which saw three different angles across their length on the older bike. Here, they are a straight line for the majority of their length, before angling almost vertically southwards to the rear dropout. The shape of the rear triangle puts me in mind of the Specialized Shiv time trial bike.

Like almost all new gravel bikes, the dropout is UDH compatible, and Dubau Prévot's bike here is fitted with the SRAM Red AXS XPLR groupset, complete with aftermarket CeramicSpeed pulley wheels.

Like the predecessor, the chainstays are dropped on both sides, allowing them to flare outwards to make room for the wide tyres without fouling the chainring.

Speaking of tyre clearance, though, and in a move that goes against almost every other bike leaked here and launched so far this year, it doesn't look like Pinarello has added any. Wrapped around Dubau-Prévot's Mavic wheels is a pair of 50mm Hutchinson Touareg tyres, and there's not a huge gap between the chainstays at the rear. You could probably go a little wider, and as with most bikes, there's plenty of extra space at the front between the fork, but we'd be surprised if 50mm wasn't the quoted maximum when this bike comes to launch. 

Of course, it's important to remember that 50mm is still in line with – probably even more than – the average. The Specialized Crux offers 47mm, and Canyon's Grail tops out at a quite restrictive 42mm, for example. Pinarello was ahead of the wide-tyre trend already, so might not feel the need to go wider again, even if most athletes are turning to 2.1 and 2.2in mountain bike tyres.

This bike is being raced at Unbound this weekend, but it's evident that it hasn't solely been designed with racing in mind. 

The fork legs both feature a trio of mounting points for carrying heavy loads, there are mounts inside the front triangle for carrying a frame bag, two mounts on the top of the top tube for carrying an extra bag behind the stem, and a further two mounts beneath the bottom bracket for a third bottle cage.

There are mudguard mounts fitted beneath the fork crown and behind the bottom bracket, too. 

We've received no word as to when Pinarello might be set to launch this bike, nor in fact, that it is 100% set to be the new Grevil F. 

We're told the sponsored athletes here in town have been riding it for just a few weeks now, and since there are around half a dozen of them in town, we're pretty confident it's far past the early prototype stage.