World Championship Value
Question: what frameset are you most likely to see a Team CSC rider on? Soloist Carbon? Nope. R3? Nope. If you said Soloist Team, you'd be spot on. Whether training or racing, the frameset you're most likely to see Julich, Blaudzin, or Stuey riding is the workhorse Soloist Team.
There are number of reasons for this. First, the tough aluminum frameset travels well. When you're lugging your bikes around the globe, packing them up, hosing them down, packing them, hosing them down, and packing them up again it's advantageous to have an aluminum frame...especially one with Cervelo's weight-saving and resilient anodized finish. Second, when you're a pro out training it's like a day at the office for us mere mortals. Worries like ride quality and low weight are superfluous: you just need to put in the hours on something tough and reliable. It doesn't hurt that the Soloist Team is also supremely aero. Third, the Soloist Team is a bargain. At a fraction of the cost of what it takes to build a Soloist Carbon or R3, let alone the massively labor intensive Soloist SLC SL or R3 SL, Cervelo can supply CSC team riders with plenty of Soloist Teams without having to dig ever deeper into their pockets. Supporting a pro team is, like any business, something which requires prudent budgeting.
None of this is to imply that the Soloist Team is anything but a first-class race machine. The Soloist Team has won everything from Spring Classics like Liege-Bastogne-Liege, to Tour stages. And every year that the CSC team rolls into our Philadelphia home base, they tend to do so on the Soloist Team. The bike has served them very well here in Philly.
The Soloist Team features the same SmartWall tube construction as its big brothers meaning this frame can be as light, stiff, and aero as possible without any risk of sacrificing strength or razor sharp cornering ability. The seat tube angle is 73 degress, but an effective seat tube angle can be adjusted to 76 degrees making this a great, inexepensive alternative to so many other time trial and triathlon framesets flooding the market.