I can honestly say that in all my years of reviewing bikes, I’ve never had as much attention from fellow cyclists as I’ve had since I’ve been riding the Van Rysel RCR Pro. You might think the Colnago V4RS, as ridden by the Tour de France winner, might elicit more, but not so. I’ve ridden one of those too, so I know.
Why all the interest? The Van Rysel RCR Pro is of course the new bike from French sports megastore Decathlon that the AG2R La Mondiale team have been riding with a great deal of success this season. When it launched it was heralded as ‘the WorldTour’s most affordable bike’ and with a price of £9,000 in the Shimano Dura-Ace pro team spec when it launched in April, it sold out instantly. However, despite costing a full £5,500 less than the Red Bull-Bora-Hansgrohe S-Works Tarmac SL8, this is a bike that is as sophisticated as any being ridden at the top level of cycling and was developed with some of the industry’s leading aerodynamicists and manufacturers including Swiss Side, Deda and Onera, the French aerospace lab, whose wind tunnel is just across the street from Decathlon’s Lille HQ.
I went to the enormous B’Twin Village in Lille and heard from Yann Le Fraillec, Van Rysel’s chief product officer, how the RCR Pro was developed in-house in just two years, from product brief to delivering it to the team and the market. If you want it from la bouche du cheval (as they probably don’t say in Lille), here it is: “Sometimes it makes me laugh when I read stories about how we copied all the models of the WorldTour teams,” Le Fraillec said. “OK, it’s a story, but it’s not the right one. We are very old in the business and have been doing carbon bikes for more than 30 years now. But we were out of the game in terms of aerodynamics and also integration so I was like, OK, I need to find an engineer, I need to find a wind tunnel, there’s Bike Valley in Belgium, there’s Silverstone… but out of the window from my office there’s a building with ‘ONERA’ written on it. Someone told me they have a wind tunnel in there. I said come on, there’s a wind tunnel 900 metres from my office, and I don’t know about it?”
ONERA is the French national aerospace lab, working with the military on projects involving aircraft, submarines, drones and other weapons, and although bicycles weren't its business it took on the Van Rysel bike as an internal project. "We worked first of all in CFD, cut the frame in slices, and they optimised every slice until we had the fastest bike. We did 10 iterations – we printed them in 3D here in our facility, put them on our shoulders and carried them over the street to the wind tunnel. We also tested against competitor bikes, and the results were unbelievably good. So we selected one out of the 10 designs – you choose between weight, stiffness, and mechanical qualities, and we chose this one with this particular layup of the carbon. We said OK, we have a game changer.”
Construction and specification
Decathlon says the RCR Pro is made with 'Super Hi Mod Carbon' that makes it 10% stiffer at the head tube than the previous flagship race bike, the RCR, and the higher modulus carbon will be lighter for the same level of stiffness. The RCR Pro has a claimed frame weight of 790g painted in a size M, which is WorldTour competitive. The geometry is equally competition focussed, with a 73° seat tube angle and 73.5° head tube for the size M, which makes the steering very responsive. The stack/reach ratio is 1.40, which is at the aggressive end. The Colnago V4RS and S-Works Tarmac SL8 are both slightly less aggressive at 1.43. The Van Rysel comes in five sizes, XS to XL.
For me, Van Rysel has got the aesthetics just right – straight tubes giving it a clean, sharp and stylish look. The tubes aren’t as deep as those of other aero all-rounders, but since the RCR Pro was first introduced, Van Rysel has unveiled the as-yet-unreleased FCR Pro, a full-blown aero bike, and now it all makes sense. But, as Le Fraillec said, the RCR Pro is a bike that’s been optimised in a wind tunnel with kammtail tubes, a cutaway seat tube, dropped seatstays, an aero seatpost and a cockpit that Van Rysel developed with Deda that’s one of the sleekest I’ve seen: the cockpit that came with the size M bike has a bar with a slight flare that has the effect of turning the hoods in slightly for a narrow, aero 36cm width with 40cm at the drops (centre-to-centre).
The stem section is satisfyingly flat and reasonably long, measured at just under 110mm (100mm, according to the website). It’s ergonomically excellent and very stiff. At the moment, Van Rysel doesn't offer customers the option to swap the cockpit for a different size before purchase – stem lengths and bar widths for each bike size are based on aggregate data – the brand said it is working internally to make this possible and is very much aware that this is a demand from its customers.
The spec of the RCR Pro Team Replica is obviously identical to that of the AG2R bike: it has a full Shimano Dura-Ace 9200 groupset, including power meter and Swiss Side Hadron Ultimate 500 wheels, which have a rim depth of 50mm and claimed weight of 1,470g per pair. These ship with Continental Grand 5000 S TR 28mm tyres set up with tubes (though Van Rysel recommends running them tubeless and supplies tubeless valves). The saddle is a Fizik Vento Argo 00, which has a carbon shell and carbon rails.
Ride impressions
I collected this review bike from the Van Rysel store inside Decathlon at Surrey Quays, London. This is Van Rysel’s first concept store and is fully equipped with all things Van Rysel, of course, plus a bike-fitting studio and Shimano Dynamics/bikefitting.com jig and setup. With the RCR Pro, Van Rysel offers a free ‘Advanced’ bike fit, taking 2.5 hours and with a value of £200 if booked separately. This is for fine-tuning your bike setup with in-depth analysis and supplies 3D motion analysis for an optimal position, pedalling analysis, and obviously sizing advice. But since I’m 100% happy with my last bike fit from Giuseppe Giannecchini, Van Rysel’s bike fitter George Quellhorst-Pawley set up the RCR Pro to those measurements, which was a very straightforward job since the bike in the size M could almost have been made to measure for me.
And that’s exactly how it felt out on the road – like ‘my’ bike. Not only did it fit me perfectly, but it immediately felt smooth, lightweight, stiff, responsive and damped all at the same time, and it hummed over the tarmac with that special frequency that emanates from high-quality carbon.
I like to ride test bikes in a road bike time trial if I can make the test period line up with one. Maybe it’s old school, but the act of pinning on a number still makes me push myself and my bike harder than I could otherwise. I took the RCR Pro to an event on a classic sporting circuit south of Bletchingley in Surrey, which starts with a long drag, goes downhill very steeply with a blind left-hander, then goes all the way up the other side of the circuit and finishes with a leg-breaking and lung-busting climb that’s the steepest of the whole course. I went faster on most segments than I’ve gone since 2019 when I was using a TT bike, and was overall faster on the course than I’ve been since then. The downhill segment with the left-hander was only two seconds slower than my PR set in 2011, and the Van Rysel felt super stable, banked over at 36mph.
In the fortnight before I rode the Maratona dles Dolomites, I did two four-hour Sunday rides in the Surrey Hills trying to pack in as much elevation as I could – it’s called panic training – and the Van Rysel felt as much at home on long, sustained hilly routes as it did in a punchy sporting time trial. With its 7.2kg weight and high level of stiffness – that’s so subtle that you might not notice it until you’re in bottom gear out of the saddle going up Tanhurst Lane or Barhatch – it’s as good as it gets. Most recently, in my final ride on the RCR Pro around what has always been my test loop, I did an all-time course PR almost accidentally – I was only planning a block of 20 minutes but was already averaging over 22mph by the time I started it.
Overall, I couldn’t find any type of road riding where I would have preferred to be on another bike. Possibly the Factor Ostro VAM that I reviewed earlier in the year, which has deeper, narrower tubes, might be slightly faster in the short time trial, but I noted in my write-up that it wasn’t the bike for long, easy-paced coffee rides. Whereas I happily rode the Van Rysel for any distance at any pace, because the ride quality is that plush. It's a bike that can do WorldTour racing, Strava PR-smashing and Gran Fondo equally well, but since it is designed for racing and has that aggressive stack/reach ratio, I'd caveat this by emphasising that it's important to establish that the saddle-bar drop isn't too extreme if you're after a road bike for endurance riding only.
Verdict
Despite the headlines, the £9,000 price tag is actually not that far below some other WorldTour bikes. The Dura-Ace-specced Factor Ostro VAM I reviewed, for example, has a price of £10,799 (though no power meter), while the new Canyon Aeroad CFR with Dura-Ace Di2 and power meter is £9,299. It did make a good headline and created a lot of handy hype for Decathlon, but the RCR Pro's all-round performance, for me, is the great thing about it and if it costs a few hundred or a few thousand pounds less than other WorldTour bikes then that just makes it even better.
