A key advantage that a bike manufacturer benefits from supplying bikes to a professional race team is the feedback they can get from some of the best bike riders in the world. We often see the results of such partnerships with new bikes and equipment, usually being released around the time of the Tour de France for maximum exposure.

And such is the case with the Cervelo Test Team. They’re keen to stress that this setup is more than just supplying bikes, and that they riders essentially offer a rolling testbed to try out new ideas. The result of this partnership is the news that Cervelo has been working on a sub-700g frame (54cm).

Cervelo has a lab on California where new manufacturing techniques are carried out, with experimentations in carbon layup to achieve significant weight savings. This allows new ideas to be easily carried out and then tested by one or several of their riders. The frames are built by hand, so every step of the process is controlled by Cervelo.

Find out what Thor thinks of the new bike in this video http://www1.cervelo.com/en_us/engineering/project-california/

Availability is expected to be August.