Ineos Grenadiers using special fleet of superlight frames repainted by Formula 1 company at the Vuelta a España

Superlight paint.

While walking the pits at the start of stage 2 of the Vuelta a España my eye was caught at the Ineos Grenadiers team bus, not by a different paint job per se, but by the lack of paint entirely on the rear end of Carlos Rodriguez’ Pinarello Dogma F. The sterilising Portuguese sun revealed swaths of raw carbon, not only on the frame but on the seatpost too. Speaking exclusively to Cyclingnews, the team’s Performance Director, Scott Drawer, revealed Rodriguez’ bike is one of a small fleet of superlight race bikes created in partnership with Silverstone Paint Technology (SPT), a primarily Formula 1 focussed outfit specialising in minimalist coatings. 

Rodriguez' Dogma F was clearly sporting a much more minimalist paint job than the rest of the Ineos bikes (Image credit: Will Jones)

Even his seatpost had been stripped back to the bare minimum in terms of coatings. (Image credit: Will Jones)

Drawer revealed that while the team bikes are certainly light - consumer spec models can easily be built to hit the UCI weight limit - the team has access to a fleet of frames that have been stripped of their factory paint by SBT, before being repainted in-house to add as little mass as possible. In this case, the raw carbon has been given a minimal clear lacquer, and even the paint itself is visibly thinner.

The stage two profile is unlikely to ever be described as truly alpine, and only Rodriguez seemed to be opting for the lighter paint, though Josh Tarling sported a nearly paintless seatpost also. Perhaps these two riders, tall in stature as they are and therefore using larger and heavier frames, are more likely to need extra help in keeping their machines as feathery as possible.

Josh Tarling also had a lightened seatpost on his Dogma, but it was less extreme, and his frame had the standard paintwork. (Image credit: Will Jones)

While it doesn't show too well in photographs, the paint at the headtube especially was noticeably thinner on Rodriguez' bike (Image credit: Will Jones)

While this isn’t something that has been reported elsewhere, it appears the SBT partnership is not a new one for the Ineos Grenadiers. On the SBT Facebook page there is an announcement of the partnership that dates back to 2018, and a YouTube video released in 2020 from the SBT channel outlines that the company has achieved a 7% mass reduction on the team’s Dogma F7 framesets. Drawer wasn’t able to provide a figure as to how much weight the partnership saves now, but it is likely still significant.

This is far from the first foray into the world of performance cycling for SBT though. A further trawl through the company archives reveals partnerships with Sunweb in 2019 on the team’s Cérvelo bikes, an apparent one-off project with Dimension Data in 2018 to paint Mark Cavendish’s Cérvelo S5, and with British Cycling to paint the track team’s team pursuit machines for the Rio Olympics in 2016.

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