Top 20 fastest road bikes in the world according to Strava (2023)

Strava's strength is its size: over 50 million athletes across a variety of sports use the platform to track where they've gone, how fast they've gone, and how they've been feeling. In the process, a digital mountain of data is being built up — data that can inform advocates, track active transportation, and improve infrastructure.

But for many users, using Strava is less idealistic - people mainly want to track their exercises and know if they are getting fitter and faster. And if we say "faster", then the hardware is important.

In December, Strava announced its annualReport for the year in sports, which analyzed all activities in 2019 and presented them in a quick, easy-to-learn format. Hidden in the attachment to this document was a list of the five fastest bikes on Strava. Not surprisingly, they were all triathlon and time trial bikes, but I was left wondering: which were the fastestdrugrower 2019?

So I asked.

After quite a long search over the last few months, developing parameters to filter all these millions of activities, Strava has created a list, available exclusively for CyclingTips. Many of the bikes featured are not all that surprising, but I am happy to report that there is at least one fascinating exception that will keep you on your toes.

Let's dive in.

Parameters

Strava data is big, but it wasn't particularly tidy in this case. This is in no way intended to be disparaging: when you are dealing9.01 billionkilometers of cycling activity by millions of users per year, this type of task must be approached broadly.

This means reducing all these data points to the most useful and clear list possible, and removing things that might skew it. Here's how we sliced ​​it.

numbers:For a bike to count here, it had to be ridden by at least 500 different users of this model. This could mean that there is a super-fast, artisanal aero bike that has a handful of very fast riders, but you won't find it on this list.

This also means that each of these users must enter the bike into Strava in the same way. In the "Equipment" section of your Strava settings, when you add a bike, you can designate a public display name, followed by the make and model.

This list shows the make and model, which eliminates playful or theft-proof bike names that people may have set up to publicly display their bike profiles ("Black Beauty" or whatever) and probably gives the correct model name (albeit with some ambiguity) about Specialized vs. S-Works, Propel vs. Propel Advanced, etc.)

There is no way to filter out which generation of bike a rider is referring to, so the "Specialized Venge" could be from any of the three designs that bore that name for the better part of a decade.

Place:Some places are hilly. Some places are flat. It will have an impact, but generally - with one notable exception - everything should come out after washing, especially on bikes sold worldwide. Strava has also excluded racing, commuting, indoor rides, and virtual rides from the list to allow for a more accurate picture of a particular bike's performance in real-world riding conditions.

A note on the average:They are all calculated based on "average speed", not average average. The reason for this on Strava's part is that it reduces the impact of factors such as cyclists forgetting to stop their activity, put their bike in the car, and return home after a ride.

Real world numbers

Every road bike manufacturer worth looking at launches a new model with a series of claims about how much faster you'll be on a 40km time trial at 48.1km/h and a zero angle curve. Which is fine and maybe even noticeable, but the problem is that most motorcycle manufacturers use their own testing methodologies and may even (supposedly) present the data in a way that suits them best.

But when you introduce millions of riders to the real world, you don't get a seamlessly optimized picture of a bike's potential greatness. You have riders of all shapes and sizes battling terrain and traffic, wind and weather, on whatever bike they paid for with their own hard-earned money.

From a statistical point of view, this does not mean pure data in the rigorous aero-sanctioned sense. But it certainly makes for a fascinating list.

Without further ado, here are the 20 fastest road bikes of 2019 on Strava.

Description

For clarity, I have listed the top 20 belowdifferent modelsto remove duplicate bikes with slightly different names. These are listed in the right column with their usually - but not always - similar average speeds.

Canyon's Aeroad CF SLX wins the title of 2019's fastest road bike, with an average speed of 28.8 km/h / 17.9 mph.

No wonder the road list is dominated by the bigger brands you've heard of, with aero road bikes taking the top three spots. Indeed, on the unfiltered list - before I cleared models with similar names - eight of the top 10 were from the aero road bike category, and four of the top 11 were Specialized's Venge variants.

This confirms what the industry has been telling consumers for years: that aerodynamics matter. In a year of real-world riding, the aero road bikes were actually a bit faster.

Of course, there is no doubt that there are some biases in selection - faster riders value speed more and gravitate towards bikes that can offer them more - but as I said before, we are looking at this in a broader context.

But wait...

As you browse through this list, there are a few brands you know - and if you're like me, there's one you probably don't know. In fourth place - faster than several lighter, aerodynamically optimized machines - is something called the Sensa Romagna.

I'll save you a Google search: this is a value-oriented aluminum-framed bike from a Dutch company that comes with Shimano 105 at its flashiest and costs between €949 and €1,499. The pipes are round, the cockpit is not integrated and the rims are shallow.

The presence of Romagne in this excellent company took me completely by surprise, so I did some digging.

Strava was unable to provide a breakdown of the locations Romagna was driving at the time of publication, and Sensa did not respond to my email, but as far as I know - apart from a modest handful of dealers in Germany and Belgium - the brand is mainly sold in (very flat) the Netherlands.

I think this shows that even after billions of kilometers and 365 days of data, you can only get to the heart of the matter. Aerodynamics can give a bike an advantage on a variety of terrains around the world, but a cheap and cheerful aluminum bike can still match up with the best of them - if only about 500 Dutchmen ride it on flat roads.