Formula 1 and the bike industry have closer ties than you’d initially assume – Specialized has worked with McLaren, J.Laverack makes the .1R with Aston Martin and BMC has long since been involved with Red Bull. Or more specifically, Red Bull Advanced Technologies (RBAT), the company’s engineering consultancy division. Its latest bike, the Teammachine R, is the result of the two brands’ most extensive collaboration yet.
‘The relationship has developed over about five years,’ says Stefan Christ, BMC’s head of R&D. ‘It the start it was quite general – exchanging and evaluating any technologies we thought could benefit the other. Then things naturally coalesced around making race bikes.’
BMC isn’t short of engineering experience, but given the scale of RBAT, it could bring a level of resources – analysis software, facilities and engineering manpower – to bear that would be financially impossible for BMC to obtain on its own.
‘They are also outside of the bike industry, so can approach problems with fresh perspective,’ says Christ. ‘We saw employing them as a way to better our Teammachine SLR, which we consider as a benchmark race bike.’
BMC set some pretty stringent objectives. The new bike had to be faster than BMC’s previous aero bike, the Timemachine R, and best the stiffness of the Teammachine SLR, but do so while staying within 50g of that bike’s weight. Otherwise though, RBAT was given free-rein, and its influence appears to be substantial because the result, at least visually, is something decidedly un-BMC.
The Teammachine R is a lot more angular and finessed than the collection of clean lines that have come to characterise BMC bikes for the last decade and more. There’s no doubting the efficacy of BMC’s previous models – simple shapes and design solutions are often the best – but there’s more of a sense that the Teammachine R has been sculpted by the wind itself. Christ is reticent to label it an aero bike though.
‘They often concede weight and handling performance,’ he says. ‘Our new bike does neither; it’s our definition of the best all-round race bike.’
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From the front
The bike's leading edge, being responsible for the bulk of its aero performance, provides the starkest example of RBAT’s impact. The fork has a flared, shallow crown that tapers into wide-stance legs. BMC dubs it the Halo fork, in reference to the halo structural feature that protects drivers in the cockpits of F1 cars.
‘We went wide with the fork because it creates space for the turbulent air, created by the rotating front wheel, to pass through the area and more smoothly onto the frame,’ says Christ. ‘A bigger gap between fork and wheel also improves stability at a wider range of wind angles out on the road.’
Despite acres of space left and right, the crown presses low over the top of the tyre, limiting clearance to 30mm.
The head tube is a similar departure from BMC’s usual design language, moving to a heavily waisted profile than extends rearward significantly, instead of the Coke can-like silhouette BMC has favoured before for stiffness reasons.
‘This was where RBAT earnt its keep,’ says Christ. ‘Within the frameset dimensions, a huge amount of work went into composite layup research – reducing overlap, optimising placement angles and fibre type usage – to ensure our stiffness and weight targets could still be met, despite the move away from our proven design rationales. The Teammachine R is made from 350 carbon plies and takes our staff four hours just to assemble in the moulds.’
The ‘Marianna’ bottom bracket junction – ‘so deep we named it after the trench’, according to Christ – links the adjoining tubes in webbing-like fashion, creating a massive cross section thanks to BMC standing by the now-unfashionable BB86 standard. Given the width that standard allows both stiffness and airflow across the rear of the bike is improved (the shell can be 86mm wide, as opposed to being limited to 68mm if, for example, the BSA standard was opted for). There’s even a little fairing-like nubbin that extends off the bottom of the junction to help guide air across the lower portion of the rear wheel. There isn’t much RBAT hasn’t thought of to make this bike fast.
That said, for all the original features the collaboration introduced, BMC was still able to deploy certain elements of its own creation, such as the ‘Aerocore’ bottle cages that smooth the transition between tube and bottle, plus the narrow ICS Aero cockpit debuted on the brand’s fantastic Kaius gravel bike.
Paired with the same rectangular steerer used on most of BMC’s modern drop bar bikes (which facilitates brake hoses travelling inside the top headset bearing), the brand is able to hide cables incredibly cleanly, although their fully-internal nature does make the aspects of the bike’s front end harder to service. Interestingly, the cockpit is available in just one width (36cm at the hoods, with flared drops) to encourage a body position aggressive enough to support the premise of the frameset. However, it is at least available in stem lengths from 80mm up to 140mm, and BMC will work with dealers to ensure the correct length is built onto the customer’s bike.
The seatpost is a picture-perfect kamm-tail in cross-section, with Christ saying it was made as light and thin as possible while still being able to accommodate a Shimano Di2 battery, and the wheel/tyre combination is similarly aero-focussed.
DT Swiss’ ARC 1100s are proven stiff, fast, and well-built wheels, but their 20mm internal width is on the narrow side for such a modern bike. Correspondingly (because tyres must pair appropriately with rim width), the Pirelli P-Zero Race TLR SL tyres promise low rolling resistance and good grip but are limited to 26mm in size.
‘We optimised for 26-28mm tyres,’ says Christ. ‘We sell with 26mm because that’s what the DT wheels are designed around, but our racing team is on 28mm. Above 28mm wide tyres we started to see compromises in aero performance.’
Setting out boundaries
RBAT approaching bike design with no preconceived notions is an advantage in plenty of ways, but strict guidance in some areas was necessary to provide the ride characteristics BMC wanted.
‘Geometry was one of the only areas that wasn’t up for debate,’ says Christ. ‘The Teammachine R is basically identical to the SLR, as we’ve refined that for years.’
That means fit geometry on a size 56 is based around a racy but not extreme stack and reach of 563mm and 393mm respectively (this is about average for a bike in this category), but combined with a more idiosyncratic handling geometry. BMC pairs a 72.3 head tube angle with 43mm of fork offset. With 26mm tyres, this creates a trail of 63mm, which would increase further if bigger, more practical tyres were used.
Not especially tight 410mm chainstays then contribute to a wheelbase 1mm shy of a metre. Both trail and wheelbase are long in comparison to rivals, suggesting the Teammachine R, despite being aggressive in most other respects, should handle more conservatively.
‘A twitchy bike will feel faster, but won’t necessarily give its rider the confidence to actually go faster,’ says Christ.
So it was when I was able to spend some time aboard the bike. Manoeuvring through technical urban roads and traffic to get onto the quieter roads that form the meat of my rides was a subdued experience versus a bike with tighter geometry, which generally feels more engaging in the same setting. However, once into my rides proper and up to speed, the Teammachine R’s stretched out handling made it stable and afforded plenty of confidence on twisting descents despite the narrow tyres.
A rarer attribute that I picked up on though was the bike’s performance when getting to those descents in the first place. It seemed to ease up the draggy climbs that I generally dread. You know the ones: middling in both length and gradient, where no matter how good your legs are that day, you just feel slow. Not steep enough for a lightweight bike to make its presence (or rather, lack of it) known, but not flat enough for there to be any tangible sense of help from an aero bike. The Teammachine R’s superbly balanced combination of both light weight and aero qualities came into their own in these situations, and I felt like I was riding faster than I had much right to do.
No free lunch
While false flats are the BMC Teammachine R’s bread and butter, I doubt it gives up much ground to full-blown aero bikes elsewhere either, but would say that speed is owed in large part to its narrow bars. I liked the ICS Aerocockpit on the brand’s Kaius gravel bike but think their application here is even more appropriate. Their flattened tops are not so elongated that they aren’t comfortable to hold, and their drops are nice and compact, with a little flare for extra width as an antidote to that narrow hoods position.
On a road race bike as opposed to a gravel one, they are reminiscent of the Pinarello Dogma F’s or Trek Madone’s bar shape, in that they encourage the rider to tuck in and down, presumably significantly decreasing their frontal area. For all its collaboration with Red Bull and tuned tube profiles, this one feature is probably the most effective aero trick the Teammachine R possesses. Narrow but ergonomic bars are anything but ubiquitous on stock bikes though, so BMC still deserve significant credit for pulling it off.
The Teammachine R creating a similar ride position as the Madone fosters a similar sense of ease at achieving and maintaining high speeds, but I would say the extreme architecture of the Madone’s back end, with its cantilevered seat tube, does produce more comfort. Tellingly BMC makes no comfort claims about the Teammachine R, and indeed the bike’s ride quality had me feeling particularly attuned to the road surface, to put it politely.
Thankfully the bars deploy some carbon layup trickery to be stiff under torque but somewhat flexible under vertical loads, means the front was a little more forgiving, but neither end was helped but the speccing of what I think, in this day and age, are inexcusably narrow tyres. The 26mm Pirellis are racy, being light and feeling supple, but inherently just don’t provide enough volume to give the frameset the help it needs in soaking up bumps.
The stock-supplied tyres might be suitable for road racers on smooth courses (although, as Christ says, even the BMC-sponsored Tudor Pro Cycling team uses 28mm tyres) but for normal riders on typical road surfaces they simply aren’t the best or fastest option. I appreciate the bike is aimed at racers, but I would have preferred BMC to spec wider tyres as standard so the rider gets a more practical tyre size initially and can size down if they want to. I think doing it this way would suit more people straight off the bat than the way it is currently.
That said, tyre clearance is still uncommonly limited. In an age when Tadej Pogačar is winning back-to-back Grand Tours on tyres with measured widths upwards of 32mm, on wheels using a 25mm internal width, I can’t see much justification in an overall performance sense for BMCs setup being faster.
BMC argues that this is the fastest pairing for the frameset, and while it’s encouraging to see them take such a cohesive approach to the Teammachine R’s design, I’d counter that the design should have been geared around more contemporary tyre sizes in the first place. Aero performance can’t be considered in isolation when comfort, grip and rolling resistance all make undeniable contributions to performance and are generally improved with more tyre volume.
It'll find fans
Perhaps my perspective in the tyre region indicates that the BMC Teammachine R, despite how much I enjoyed riding it generally, isn’t the bike for me. I’m no racer, after all, and Christ confirms this isn’t a bike for everyone.
‘Some enthusiasts may find the Teammachine R a bit harsh,’ he says. ‘It’s the reason we introduced this alongside the SLR, instead of replacing it.’
And if, like me, more tyre clearance is your thing, BMC’s recently renovated Roadmachine has it by the bucketful, ensuring there should be a road bike for everyone in the Swiss brand’s range these days. Provided you’ve got deep pockets, of course.
- To find out more about the BMC Teammachine R 01 One, visit bmc-switzerland.com
BMC Teammachine R 01 One spec
| Price | £14,000/€14,999/$14,999 |
| Brand | BMC |
| Frame | Teammachine R 01 Premium Carbon |
| Fork | Teammachine R 01 Premium Carbon |
| Weight | 7kg (56cm) |
| Sizes available | 47, 51, 54, 56, 58, 61 |
| Levers | SRAM Red AXS |
| Brakes | SRAM Red AXS |
| Rear derailleur | SRAM Red AXS |
| Front derailleur | SRAM Red AXS |
| Crankset | SRAM Red AXS, 48/35t |
| Bottom bracket | PF86 |
| Cassette | SRAM Red AXS, 10-30T |
| Chain | SRAM Red Flattop |
| Wheels | DT Swiss ARC 1100 62 |
| Tyres | Pirelli P-Zero Race SL TLR, 26mm |
| Cockpit | BMC ICS Carbon Aero |
| Seatpost | Teammachine R 01 Premium Carbon |
| Saddle | Fizik Argo Vento R1 |
