Wilier’s Filante SLR aero bike is ageing like a fine wine
Words SAM CHALLIS Photography TAPESTRY
Wilier’s Filante SLR is not a new bike. Considering it was released in late 2020 and the product cycle of a bike such as this tends to be no longer than five years, this bike is an elder statesman in the aero bike category. That said, it is still competitive on the WorldTour, being Mark Cavendish’s ride this season, and the older it gets, the more ahead of its time it seems. Several aero features the Filante SLR debuted have seen more widespread use in subsequent rival bikes.
‘We may be 117 years old but we’re never content to trade on our heritage, otherwise the company wouldn’t have survived so long,’ says Claudio Salomoni, Wilier’s head of product development. ‘We’re always looking forward at emerging technology and new design concepts. In the case of the Filante, a good example is its wide-stance fork and seatstays.’
Versus its predecessor, the Cento10, the Filante’s fork legs and seatstays are 7mm further outboard.
‘In the development of our Turbine TT bike, we saw we needed as much space between the wheel and frameset as possible to encourage clean airflow,’ says Salomoni. British brand Hope released its wild HBT Olympic track bike for Team GB around the same time, which helped validate the Filante’s design, and since then road bikes such as Factor’s Ostro VAM have used the feature too.
‘You need to either have a large gap or no gap, which is impractical due to factors such as differing tyre widths and rim shapes. Any middling gap means air can’t squeeze in between smoothly, meaning its pressure increases and, with that, drag,’ says Salomoni. ‘That said, I won’t pretend we always hold all the cards. We’ve had ideas before that we were convinced would change the game, gone to the effort of 3D printing prototypes and testing them in a wind-tunnel, only to see the data and realise we need to throw the whole thing in the bin.’
Along the right lines
A brainwave at the more successful end of the development spectrum was the rationale governing the tube profiles. This isn’t the most aggressive aero bike going, without hugely extended tube depths. Salomoni says that’s because Wilier wanted to keep the Filante’s weight low.
‘We wanted to give our riders a more aero option that felt similar to our Zero SLR to ride. So we got the Filante frame to within 100g or so, meaning builds under 7kg are possible. The Zero SLR still trumps it for pure light weight, but the Filante offers pretty well-rounded performance.’
Also sof
