Sarto launches revamped Lampo aero road bike for 2015

Sarto isn’t a name many people will have heard of before, but you might be more familiar with their work: they’ve been making frames for big brands for the past 60 years. They can’t reveal the details of which manufacturers they’ve worked with though, but it probably wouldn’t take much investigation on the Internet to reveal some examples. More recently, they’ve decided to step out of the shadows with their own range of frames.

The company makes about 2500 frames a year, with a team of 20 people responsible for every aspect of the manufacturing process. Sarto’s USP is fully bespoke frames, made to measure where every specification can be tailored just the way you want it. Using a tube-to-tube manufacturing technique allows them to offer this full custom treatment.

They were exhibiting at the recent Cycle Show at Birmingham’s NEC recently and had a collection of fine looking 2015 models, and thisLampo aero road bike was the highlight. 

They’ve used CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamic) to shape every tube profile and junction, with the main changes being a new seat tube with an internal seat clamp, updated “Isoflow” seatstays and a newly designed fork, which now neatly cuts into the underside of the down tube.

The seat tube uses a Kamm Tail profile (a teardrop with the tail section chopped off). The integrated seat clamp maintains a flat top tube line all the way from the head tube, with an expanding wedge at the front of the post operated by a single Allen bolt that you can see in the picture above.

There’s also a direct mount brake option, as that seems to be the trend with most aero road bikes at the moment (such as Colnago’s new V1-r to pluck one example). A result of these changes has been a reduction in frame weight, lopping about 70g off the weight so that Sarto now claim a 980g frame weight for a medium.

That’s for a raw finish without the optional integrated seatmast. The head tube is tapered, gear and brake cables are internally routed and there is a press fit 86.5 bottom bracket. Interestingly Sarto say they will offer a disc brake option on all their frames, including the Lampo and the Seta down below.

Another highlight was the Seta. This is their lightest frame with a claimed weight of just 700g, which puts it right up there with the very lightest frames money can buy, certainly right up there with the likes of the Cervelo RCA and Trek Emonda. 

The frame uses the PressFit 86.5 bottom bracket standard with a tapered head tube and cable routing that can be universal, so it’ll accept any mechanical or electronic groupset, or a specific Di2 or EPS routing.

So those are the Sarto 2015 highlights. We’re hoping to get a ride on the Seta very soon and we very much look forward to finding out how it performs, because if all the good things we’ve heard about Sarto frames are to be believed, it should be a very nice ride.