Cervelo Caledonia Ultegra Di2 Metallic Black

PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT - THE CERVELO CALEDONIA

When the Cervelo Caledonia launched last summer it caught a lot people’s attention, not least because within a bike brand full of more functional, business-like model names such as S5, R5, P-Series and R-Series the model name ‘Caledonia’ immediately stood out as something different; did this name hint at a road bike that was less about performance and more about freedom and versatility? Our curiosity had been piqued…

The Cervelo Caledonia actually gets its name from a street in Toronto, Canada which sees Cervelo’s head office staff riding out on their weekly after-work group ride. It turns out those social rides were fairly typical of how a large proportion of us are increasingly riding our road bikes; cycling on the road is not all about performance and an endless hunt for more speed, nowadays it’s about riding socially with friends, seeking out new café stops, exploring new terrain and not flinching when the roads change from smooth tarmac to rough back lanes and even small stretches of gravel road. This ethos has been helped in no small part by the advent of disc brakes on road bikes which have significantly increased tyre clearance opening up the option of running larger volume tyres that can handle rougher terrain. Better brakes, more capable tyres, sophisticated carbon fibre construction and carefully considered frame geometry have all contributed to producing the sort of versatile, user-friendly road bikes that we probably should have been riding all along.

So as we’ve established the Caledonia doesn’t fit in a box nicely, it was conceived on Cervelo’s Thursday night rides on routes that often play fast and loose with the ‘road ride’ terminology. As the designers and engineers on this ride tried to stuff bigger tires into their R5 road bikes or streamline their Aspero gravel bikes the realisation that they needed a totally new kind of road bike became too obvious to ignore.