Picture the mechanic's bench at any WorldTour service course this spring. Cassettes splayed out like fish bones, a battery charger blinking on the wall, and a sponsor rep hovering to make sure nobody photographs the prototype too closely. There is a thirteenth cog now where for a century there were five, then ten, then twelve. Somewhere Tullio Campagnolo, who patented the quick release in 1930 because he froze his fingers trying to flip a wheel on a snowy Croce d'Aune pass, would either be thrilled or asking why we still need two chainrings. This season's gear answers a surprising amount of that question.
Here is what landed, what the riders actually warmed to, what got the side-eye, and where the whole circus is heading in 2027.
Groupsets: the gear count keeps climbing
Campagnolo got the jump on everyone. Super Record 13 arrived as the first road groupset running a 2x13 rear derailleur, a genuine world first, with in-house Italian batteries good for around 750km and a USB-C port so you can stop hunting for the proprietary charger you lost in 2022. The complete 2x road build comes in at 2,441g and €4,300, with a power meter option for €600 that undercuts the old Super Record meter by roughly half. Then Vicenza did the thing nobody expected from Campagnolo and made it cheaper: the new Record 13 inherits the same architecture for €2,699, which is €1,601 less than its sibling. For a marque that spent decades as the most expensive way to mount a chain, that is a real shift in posture.
SRAM spent the year refining rather than reinventing. The latest Red AXS is the best the brand has built, lighter by a claimed 154g, which makes it the lightest electronic disc drivetrain going. The headline is the braking: roughly 80% less lever effort in the hoods and a third less in the drops, enough that one-finger stopping is now genuine from any position. Reviewers love the ergonomics and the smoother shift. The honest caveat is that it still trails Dura-Ace Di2 on outright shift speed, so it reads as a fixing of five years' worth of small complaints. SRAM also pushed 12 and 13-speed Force and Rival down the range, which is where most of us actually shop.
Shimano, conspicuously, has said nothing official, which in Shimano dialect means everything. The E-Tube app reportedly now shows configuration for a 13-speed drivetrain, the R9300 Dura-Ace is expected around mid-2026 (the Tour de France being the traditional reveal window), and the smart money is on a fully wireless 13-speed flagship landing somewhere in the $4,200 to $4,800 range. Ultegra trickle-down would follow 12 to 18 months later, so do not hold your breath for affordable thirteen before late 2027.
Bikes: everything is an aero bike now
The category walls have fallen. The interesting machines this year refuse to sit in their lane, and the launches prove it.
Cervélo's new S5 is the one to beat. It is 6.3 watts faster than the old model and 124g lighter, needing only 204 watts to push itself through the air at 45km/h, a figure very few bikes touch. The new one-piece bar finally retires the polarising two-piece V-stem. Praise comes with one recurring note: it is so stable and composed that several testers found it faintly clinical to ride, fast in a way that feels almost remote. At €13,999 it is also the priciest aero bike in its peer group.
Colnago's Y1Rs is the wild one, the frame Tadej rode to the 2025 Tour win. Colnago lifted the seatpost off the seat tube entirely and bolted it to the top tube so the tube itself can hug the rear wheel, dropping frontal area by 19% versus the V4Rs and saving 20 watts at 50km/h. It is a brilliant, slightly flawed specialist, and at around $21,000 it is a third or fourth bike for most people who can even contemplate it.
Factor's revised Ostro VAM is the quiet overachiever, 250g lighter and 7 watts quicker, a sub-7kg build that hits the UCI limit while posting wind-tunnel numbers level with the S5. The 15mm-wide seatpost is the sort of detail that boutique British engineering obsesses over while nobody is watching. Pinarello's Dogma F got an evolutionary nudge (CdA down 0.2%, a 3.5-degree rotated down tube, a stiffer bottom bracket), the refinement of a platform that did not need rescuing. Trek killed the Émonda outright and folded it into the Madone Gen 8, now 7.05kg in a medium with the new OCLV 900 carbon, claiming 19 watts saved at 45km/h over the old Émonda. Specialized held the Tarmac SL8 at its class-leading 685g frame while the rumour mill spins up an SL9. Canyon went sideways and turned the Endurance CFR into a cobble-eating near-Aeroad with 35mm clearance and only one extra watt of drag, the endurance-bike-as-race-bike trend made literal.
Wheels: hookless wins the argument it never fully settled
Zipp's 202 NSW is the brand's lightest ever at 1,064g, hookless with a 23mm internal bed built for wide rubber and low pressure. ENVE held its SES line on hookless too, capping pressures at 80psi on the 25mm-internal rims. The hookless debate, which raged loudest after a 2024 pro-race tyre blow-off, has cooled into an uneasy truce. The performance case is real (lower pressures, softer ride, better wide-tyre aero), and the compatibility case is real too (your tyre choice list is shorter and your pressure ceiling is lower than a hooked rim would impose). Most riders have stopped arguing and started checking the approved-tyre chart before they buy. DT Swiss, sensibly, keeps offering hooked options for the holdouts.
Tyres: wider, faster, and finally honest about hookless
The rubber caught up with the rims. Continental's GP5000 S TR is now hookless-compatible, a first for Conti road tubeless, and tough enough that teams ran it at Paris-Roubaix. Pirelli's P Zero Race TLR with the new SpeedCORE casing and SmartEVO compound posts the lowest rolling resistance in its class with a genuinely supple ride. Schwalbe's Pro One Aero splits front and rear into specific shapes and claims up to 22% less drag than the old Pro One TT, the clearest sign yet that tyres are now an aero component rather than an afterthought. Vittoria's Corsa N.EXT swapped cotton for nylon casing for durability, the sensible everyday choice in a range whose halo tyres chase grams. The throughline is width: 28mm and 30mm are the new race standard, and the tyre makers have stopped pretending otherwise.
What it all points to for 2027
Three threads run through the season, and they all tighten next year. Thirteen speeds become the default at the top once Shimano commits, which it clearly will, and the only question is how fast it reaches Ultegra money. The front derailleur keeps looking endangered: 1x dominated the cobbles this spring, SRAM owns the ecosystem, and the moment Shimano builds road-specific 1x ratios for Di2 the conversation tips for good. And the category labels keep dissolving, so the bike you buy in 2027 will likely be sold as a do-everything race machine with 32mm clearance, a hookless wheelset, and a tyre that was wind-tunnel-tuned alongside the frame.
The throughline Tullio would recognise: every one of these "innovations" is the industry doing what it has always done, which is taking the thing pros needed last season and selling it to the rest of us, slightly heavier and considerably cheaper, the year after. The good news is that the year after is starting to arrive faster than it used to.
Credit: Photo: MrPanyGoff / Plamen Agov, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons