With the Cervelo P5 launch only a few days away we noticed a strange new sponsor on the Garmin Cervelo (now Garmin Barracuda) team kit. Will that mean that the new P5 will feature a hydraulic brake from Magura?
Earlier today team Garmin Barracuda showed off the new team jersey on Twitter and Facebook, and at around the same time the matching shorts showed up too. It didn't take very long to notice a strange sponsor/partner on the shorts. A brand who had not been involved with any road team before, but is very well known in the world of mountain biking. German company Magura, a name that is short for Gustav Magenwirth in Bad Urach, is best known for their hydraulic rim and disc brakes and have a very long history with that technology. More recently Magura also added mountain bike suspension forks to their quiver of offerings. The latter of course would not make as much sense for a nicely matching professional road cycling team sponsorship, but hydraulic brakes seem to be the next hot thing for road and TT bikes. This editor is thus suspecting that the Cervelo P5 introduced next week to the media in Europe will have hydraulic brakes from Magura incorporated. Magura is actually not a complete stranger to road cycling and TT bikes. Back in 1994 Dan Empfield had built up some of his Quintana Roo triathlon bikes with hydraulic rim brakes from that German company, plus Magura had offered a touring version with road levers some years back.
Some predictors have thought the new P5 might be equipped with disc brakes, a product which would allow for completely unique rim shapes, but this editor thinks that a tiny hydraulic rim brake is a more likely part of the new P5. Along those lines, Ashima introduced a hydraulic road brake a while back, and that brake appeared to be a good pick as the one we might find on the Cervelo, especially since their product looked to be pretty much ready for the market, but Ashima has been very quiet recently. Rumors have also been going around that SRAM is working on such a brake, but so far no product images have popped up. Well, neither from Magura, nor from SRAM. Plus with the Cervelo Barracuda team recently switching from SRAM components to Shimano, a SRAM brake would not be very likely.
But we will all find out for real next week which brakes will be on the P5 and what other features that highly anticipated bike will have to offer. That should then put an end to all those rumors and predictions.
The shorts below are those in question with the Magura logo just above Rotor.
Clearly the brake below is MTB version but just imagine this brake scaled down substantially, most likely with no brake bridge and with the hydraulic lines running inside the frame and aero bars.
