For his final Tour de France before retiring at the end of the 2023 season, Mark Cavendish has a special bespoke paintjob on his Wilier Filante SLR bike to honour his career.
Cavendish will be hoping to add at least one stage win to his total of 34, which would see him become the rider with the greatest number of Tour de France stage wins. He holds the record jointly with Eddy Merckx, who reached the same number of stage wins in the 1970s.
At first sight, the special-edition Wilier Filante SLR Cavendish will ride looks to be a standard black on white, but with the Wilier logo on the down tube in gold, and gold accents on the seat tube and the rear of the top tube.
However, look more closely and the white background colour is marked subtly with a white-on-light-grey abstract colour scheme. This is continued onto Cavendish’s one-piece Filante cockpit.
There’s Cavendish’s CVNDSH wordmark on the fork leg. It’s something we’ve not seen much of since Cavendish’s days riding the Specialized Venge at Omega Pharma-QuickStep, where it also adorned his Specialized Evade helmet.
Cav’s bike comes with the Dura-Ace R9200 electronic groupset run by the rest of his Astana-Qazaqstan team.
His days of running mechanical Dura-Ace back in 2013, when the rest of the Omega Pharma-QuickStep team were running electronic groupsets, are over because there’s no mechanical option for the latest 12-speed Dura-Ace groupset.
Cavendish has ridden a range of different bikes over the years and we last looked at Cav's green-jersey winning bikes through the years back in 2021.
The bike is also set up with Corima wheels in the publicity shots, although Astana-Qazaqstan are in the process of moving from Corima to HED wheels, with the US marque taking over as wheel sponsor from the French brand.
You can buy your own Wilier Filante in the same colourway as Cavendish’s bike, with an €800 supplement over the cost of the Filante SLR with its standard paint scheme.
We covered Cavendish’s team-issue Wilier Filante SLR in its standard colours at the start of the 2023 season, when he joined the team, and his Tour bike is one of those we’ll be aiming to get a closer look at ahead of the Tour de France grand départ this Saturday. Look out for some extra details in the next few days.
