| Features | ICS3 Cable Stops
ICS3 is the third generation of Cervélo Internal Cable Stops (ICS). Other brands’ internal cables often run a liner or cable housing the entire length of the cables, adding friction and up to 200 grams of dead weight to your bike.
Internal Cable Stops on the other hand, function much like external stops. The housing fits into the stops and the bare cables travel in unobstructed paths through the frame, into the bottom bracket cable guide and straight to the derailleurs. Since ICS3 stops are a standard size, Rocket barrel adjusters can be installed so on-the-fly cable tension adjustments are easy and accessible.
ICS3 also incurs the least aerodynamic drag, by locating the cable housing entry out of the wind behind the stem. In order to have the cables enter the top tube yet travel unobstructed through the downtube, our ICS3 frames use Teflon lined stainless steel tubes, curved to guide the cables into perfect alignment with the Bottom Bracket cable guide.
Trust Aero
In general, a good aero bike uses airfoil tube sections. This may seem obvious, but many “aero styled” bikes have arbitrary, “made-up” tube sections that can actually increase drag. In Cervélo’s early days, “aero sections” meant NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) airfoils.
We still use some NACA foils where they make sense, but in our long quest to help Cervélo athletes go faster, we’ve spent enough time studying bicycle aerodynamics to not only design a family of our own aerodynamic sections (our TrueAeroTM library of airfoils) that improve on NACA for bicycle performance, now we’ve arrived at the next generation of aero design. We no longer design just a tube section (two-dimensional) – we now design entire bike frame skin surfaces (three-dimensional), taking into account the different air flow characteristic in each aero zone.
Smart Wall
Smartwall intelligently redistributes material around the tube cross section to increase lateral and torsional stiffness while adding the least weight. Smartwall was inspired by Cervélo’s aero bikes, whose shapes are driven primarily by low drag considerations. Reducing the frontal area of the frame is a part of an aerodynamically efficient design, but narrow tubes have inherent challenges when trying to construct a stiff and light frame. Smartwall addresses this elegantly.
Most unwanted frame flex is out of plane, putting one side in compression and the other side in tension. Thus, material farthest from the center plane has the greatest effect on improving stiffness. Smartwall adds material only at the outside walls, farthest from the center plane, to maximize lateral stiffness and minimize weight.
Smartwall clearly makes sense for all frames. In fact, we use Smartwall to set new standards in frame stiffness, strength and weight throughout the R series. And we still use Smartwall to create stiff and light aero frames. |
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