As I walked through the pits at the start of Stage 2 of the Vuelta a España, the Ineos Grenadiers team bus caught my eye, not because of the different livery per se, but because of the complete lack of paint on the rear of Carlos Rodriguez’s Pinarello Dogma F. The sterilizing Portuguese sun exposed strips of raw carbon not only on the frame but also on the seat post. In an exclusive interview with Cyclingnews, the team’s Performance Director Scott Drawer revealed that Rodriguez’s bike is part of a small fleet of super-lightweight road bikes created in collaboration with Silverstone Paint Technology (SPT), a predominantly Formula 1-focused company specializing in minimalist paint jobs.
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Rodriguez’ Dogma F clearly had a much more minimalist paint job than the other Ineos bikes(Photo credit: Will Jones)
Even his seat post had been reduced to the absolute minimum in terms of coating.(Photo credit: Will Jones)
Drawer revealed that while the team bikes are very light – consumer models can easily be built to meet the UCI weight limit – the team has access to a whole range of frames that have been stripped of their factory paint by SBT and then repainted in-house to add as little mass as possible. In this case, the raw carbon has been coated with a minimal clear coat and even the paint itself is visibly thinner.
The profile of stage two could never be described as truly alpine, and only Rodriguez seemed to opt for the lighter paint scheme, although Josh Tarling also wore a nearly paintless seatpost. Perhaps these two riders, who are tall in stature and therefore use larger and heavier frames, need more help to keep their machines as light as possible.
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Josh Tarling also had a lighter seat post on his Dogma, but it was less extreme and his frame had the standard paint job.(Photo credit: Will Jones)
Although it is not so clearly visible in photos, the paint was noticeably thinner, especially on the head tube of Rodriguez’s bike (Photo credit: Will Jones)
Although it hasn’t been reported anywhere else, the SBT partnership seems to be nothing new for the Ineos Grenadiers. There is an announcement of the partnership on SBT’s Facebook page dating back to 2018, and a YouTube video published in 2020 by the SBT channel describes the company achieving a 7% weight reduction on the team’s Dogma F7 framesets. Drawer couldn’t put a number on how much weight the partnership saves now, but it’s likely still significant.
However, this is far from the first foray into the world of competitive cycling for SBT. A further search of the company archives reveals partnerships with Sunweb in 2019 for the team’s Cérvelo bikes, a seemingly one-off project with Dimension Data in 2018 to paint Mark Cavendish’s Cérvelo S5, and with British Cycling to paint the track cycling team’s pursuit machines for the 2016 Rio Olympics.
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