Cycling is a pretty archaic sport. The bicycle itself has been around since the 1800s, allowing for a bit of leeway with what ‘bicycle’ describes. The UCI does its best, mostly through heavy-handed banning of things out of the ordinary, to keep the evolution of the racing bicycle at a Darwinian pace.
With such slow changes to the rules governing the form of the racing bicycle, it probably hasn’t escaped your notice that the majority of aero bikes in recent years all look near-identical. Recent relaxation in the rules on tube depth has created some divergence, but given enough time, wind tunnel testing, and computational fluid dynamics it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that we could see this latest crop of one-race-bike bikes coalesce around a final form.
