A video on social media platform Threads shows Canyon-sponsored athlete Mateu Cavallé riding a new gravel bike, complete with a matching Canyon-branded suspension fork.
Until now, only the Grizl – Canyon’s adventure-focused bike – was available with a suspension fork. The Grail – the brand’s gravel race bike – hasn’t been available with a suspension fork, with geometry that wasn’t corrected for a longer fork.
The new bike looks closer to a Grail – in fact, it doesn’t appear to be a radical departure from the existing bike.
Up-front, the new bike appears to have fully internal routing compared to the current Grail’s design, where it runs under the stem and into the head tube. That suggests Canyon may have tweaked the aerodynamics of the Unbound-winning bike.
Big tyre clearances?
It also looks likely that Canyon has upped the tyre clearances on the new bike. Cavallé’s bike is set up with Zipp’s super-wide 303 XPLR wheelset, with what looks to be the Goodyear/Zipp collaboration tyre in its Inter version.
This is a 45mm-wide tyre, but the current Grail has a more modest clearance of 42mm.
Exclusive suspension
Rumours were abound last year that DT Swiss was working on a gravel suspension fork.
Given that most of the major suspension players – including Fox, RockShox, Cane Creek, Cannondale, Suntour, MRP, KS and Lauf – have something in this space, it wouldn’t be a surprise to see DT Swiss join them.
Further rumours suggested DT’s as-yet-unseen fork was, in fact, a collaboration with Canyon and would be a Canyon-exclusive component.
Whether the fork is indeed fully exclusive or will be exclusive for a set period of time, remains to be seen.
The fork appears to have a reverse arch brace, reminiscent of DT Swiss’ lightweight XC Race fork from 2015.
DT’s modern F-series mountain bike forks all have a conventional forward-facing arch brace. The reverse design is something we’ve seen in the gravel space with Fox’s impressive 32 Taper-Cast fork.
The images don’t appear to show any crown adjusters, but we wouldn’t be surprised to see some sort of lock-out – either remote or a simple button lock-out like that found on the Cane Creek Invert CS.
A report from September last year on the Bikerumor site also suggested a DT and Canyon team-up.
The design shown then, on the bike of German gravel rider Peter Scherman looked a little different from the much slimmer-looking all-black unit of Cavallé’s bike.
However, that fork could well have been a mule prototype using one of DT’s older lightweight XC designs as a basis, like the OPM ODL fork from 2015.
Why design your own?
The question remains – why would Canyon want to develop its own suspension fork?
Perhaps because of the brand's successes on the gravel racing scene, it wanted a lighter option than those currently available.
If that’s the case, working with DT Swiss would make sense because, historically, DT Swiss has made some of the lightest racing suspension forks.
If Canyon’s new race fork sets a new standard for light weight, could we see a response from the other major players? Perhaps an SL version of the RockShox Rudy Ultimate in the vein of the classic SID World Cups. Or an even lighter iteration of Fox’s 32 Taper-Cast?
With no official word yet from Canyon on a new gravel race bike, this bike looks somewhat complete. We wouldn’t be surprised to see an all-new bike line-up to help Rosa Klöser defend her Unbound title now she’s a Canyon-sponsored rider.
