Milan Vader’s Cervélo ZFS-5

Cervélo is not a brand that many of us will immediately associate with mountain bikes, and rightly so, with the brand's first mountain bike rolling out only last year.

However mountain biking is a growing sport, with plenty of multi-discipline athletes turning their hand to racing both on and off-road.

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The bike was designed with input from Vader himself and from sister company Santa Cruz

The bike that Milan Vader races on is new to the XC circuit and marks the first full suspension mountain bike that Cervélo has produced. It has been a long time coming for the brand, with Vader playing an integral role in the design of the bike, with his input vital for the geometry that the bike is based around.

Interestingly, Cervélo have produced what they are calling a ‘link lock’ which replaces the shock during a short track race in order to give the bike ‘hardtail like’ performance characteristics.

Current rules state that the same bike has to be used for both short track and Olympic distance races. To get around this the 'link lock' allows Vader to use the full suspension platform over the whole World Cup with no impact to either race.

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A link lock can be used in place of the rear shock to make the rear of the bike rigid for short track events

A little known fact is that Cervélo has a sister company, Santa Cruz, and they used the wealth of knowledge built up within the mountain bike brand to develop a suspension layout that would offer the kinematics that they were looking for. Using the Santa Cruz XC bike, the Blur, as the starting point, the suspension layout will look familiar, but beyond that, there isn’t all that much that the two bikes share.

The bike itself is a very aggressive offering for an XC bike, with the head angle coming in around 66.5º, with a 120mm fork which is not too far off where trail and enduro bikes were sitting only a few years ago.

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The bike in this configuration has 115mm or rear wheel travel paired to a 120mm fork

Although the bike is suited to a 120mm fork and 115mm of rear wheel travel, the bike has been designed to be versatile enough to also accommodate a 100/100mm configuration for less technical courses. In doing this the bike also steepens up a little to give a more responsive feeling.

The cockpit area is incredibly tidy on the ZFS-5 with the hoses being routed internally through the headtube.

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Hose routing is a nice a tidy affair with guides on the stem keeping everything in order

Tyres are an ever-changing spec choice for mountain bikers, as the conditions of the day very much dictate what the riders choose to use. At the time of filming at the Nove Mesto Na Morave World Cup, Vader had opted for some very fast rolling Vittoria Terrano 2.35 tyres. These act almost as a semi-slick with very light tread in the middle and a bit more of an aggressive pattern on the shoulders of the tyre.

The tyres are mounted to a set of Reserve 28 XC wheels from the Cervélo/ Santa Cruz in-house brand that weigh in at under 1,400 grams for the pair. It is also interesting that these are hookless rims, something that is beginning to take off in the advent of tubeless systems. Hookless rims allow for a simpler and superior manufacturing process that allows the rims to be considerably stronger and more resilient to impacts than typical hooked rims.

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A very fast rolling tyre was Vaders choice here with only shoulder tread offering any meaningful grip

Finishing off Vader’s bike is the flagship SRAM XX1 SL T-type groupset, featuring the beautiful one piece cassette and new flat top style chain that we have grown accustomed to on the road. This also features an integrated spider based power meter from the SRAM in-house brand Quarq for collecting all the relevant race data.

Bike Specification