PARIS, France.–Cube has taken its flagship Litening carbon race bike right back to the drawing board and given it an aerodynamic makeover with disc brakes only and a new integrated handlebar for full internal cable routing.
The new bike has been revealed days before the Tour de France, expect to see Wanty-Groupe Gobert racing this bike around Belgium at the weekend. Before that though, Tony was dispatched to Holland to see the new bike in the flesh and take it for a first ride.
Cube’s latest Litening is a bike built to go fast, or to be more precise it’s a bike built to go fast as efficiently as possible. Like nearly all the latest generation aero road bikes it features an integrated bar and stem, fully internal cable routing from the controls back.
It’s very much a bike of its time too when it comes to groupset and braking options in that it’s only available as with electronic groupset options – either Shimano or SRAM, and it’s disc brake only.
The Cube designers honed the design with over 100 hours in the wind tunnel and then did another 1,000 hours of flow simulations. The result is an impressively stealthy machine that makes few, if any compromises when it comes to being as aero as possible.
The biggest compromise of course for any aero race bike is complying with the UCI’s technical rules, and Cube is upfront about the fact that they pushed them to the limits with the Litening.
A quick 40km blast on flat Dutch roads certainly confirmed that it’s a fast and slippery customer, but of course, bike races aren’t just on the flat, here though the new Litening scores again with a sub kilo frame weight – 960g to be precise – for the 56cm. Cube say they looked at the competition to establish a frame weight benchmark for disc braked race bikes, they reckon most hit the scales at 1,000g, and then tried to beat that mark.
