What appears to be a new Specialized Crux was spotted at the Gralloch in Scotland this weekend, and ridden to victory in the women's UCI category by Specialized Off Road athlete Geerike Shreurs.
The new bike represents a massive departure from the traditional double-diamond, round-tubed frame of the outgoing Crux, with a facade inspired by the road-going Tarmac platform. The most notable attribute comes in the form of an aerodynamic frame and the apparent larger tyre clearance - not that the outgoing model lacked provision for wider tyres: it could accommodate widths of 47mm, and many riders successfully ran 50mm tyres paired with 1x drivetrains.
While we can't confirm the exact clearances, based on current trends in the category, we can safely assume maximum clearances of around 55-57mm, which should accommodate tyres of up to 2.2 inches wide. We've seen provision for wider tyres at the forefront of contemporary gravel frame design with bikes such as the new Factor Sarana and Open Wi.De 2.0, with the latter offering gargantuan clearances once reserved for cross-country mountain bikes.
The outgoing Specialized Crux has been around in its current incarnation since 2020 and is due for an update. Despite its now-outdated template, it has notched up a long list of victories at virtually every major gravel event, including Unbound Gravel 200, The Traka, Big Sugar Gravel, Gravel Worlds, and Gravel Burn. That's quite a palmares, but as the discipline has evolved, so has the need to go faster, and it appears as though Specialized has caved and given in to the peer pressure of the aero gravel concept.
Visually, the bike ridden by Shreurs this past weekend looks a lot like the Specialized Tarmac SL7. Based on what we know about the new Aethos 2, we can also assume the layup will have taken learnings from the SL8 and applied them to ensure a balance of stiffness and compliance, fashioned into the aerodynamic tube profiles of the SL7. We can clearly see the paucity of a 'speed sniffer' on the headtube, with the basic frame architecture, seat tube, and cutout, and dropped seatstays adopting a silhouette similar to the SL7, but with a few nods to the Tarmac SL8, including the seatpost. It certainly has been designed with aerodynamics at the forefront.
The frame and front end are very clean - no hoses are visible on the entire setup, and the cockpit looks like the one-piece integrated Alpinist 2 setup seen on the new Aethos, but with a much wider flare at the drops. Component-wise, Shreurs' bike was built around an SRAM Red XPLR AXS complete with new Roval Terra Aero CLX wheels and Specialized Pathfinder tyres.
We asked Specialized for a comment and got the following reply:
"Specialized relies on feedback from professional athletes in both developing and testing advanced pre-production products in real-world applications. With this top-level feedback, some of these design elements and products eventually show up in future retail product offerings. We call this Project Black."
Based on the brazen testing in the public eye at the Gralloch, the launch of the new Specialized Crux is imminent. We'll update this story as we receive more information.
