Cannondale has reimagined, redesigned and relaunched its SuperX model with the stated aim of dominating the world of gravel racing. “Stripped down, dialled in, and engineered for victory, the SuperX is the ultimate tool for chasing podiums and smashing personal records, everywhere from Kansas to the Worlds to your local lunch ride championships,” says the US brand.
Arguably Cannondale has already made considerable inroads into dominating the world of gravel racing thanks to having Lachlan Morton on its books. Last year the mercurial Australian rode the SuperSix EVO SE to victory at Unbound in the fastest time ever, but Cannondale claims that the SuperX takes it to the next level, that it “delivers a whole new level of speed and performance blending insights from Cannondale’s WorldTour-proven road engineering team and decades of gravel expertise.”
The SuperX started life as Cannondale’s state-of-the-art cyclo-cross race bike. It was the brand’s first carbon cross frame and it had disc brakes as long ago as 2012, but in 2021 with gravel booming, it made way for the SuperSix EVO SE and CX. Now it’s back and is claimed to draw inspiration from the SuperSix EVO road bike, which won the Tour de France mountains jersey with Richard Carapaz in 2024, pairing aerodynamics with an ultralight frame – the new SuperX weighs a claimed sub-900 grams in the pro-level LAB71 version but is still, according to Cannondale rough-road ready.
As you’d expect of a sub-900g frame, there’s no suspension system – gravel road surfaces are taken care of via flex zones in the startlingly flattened seat tube, the rear triangle, and top tube, which Cannondale says work as a system with the D-shaped seatpost to absorb shock and vibration.
Cannondale does have a gravel bike with its own Kingpin integrated suspension system already, the Topstone. But, along with other brands such as Specialized and Canyon, the gap between its gravel race bike and its gravel adventure bike continues to grow and is now wider than ever. Even the language of the press release makes it clear from the start that the focus of the SuperX is on going fast and winning rather than going slow and exploring. The geometry is “race-proven… OutFront steering design, and finely calibrated frame stiffness come together to deliver handling that is both confidently stable and pin-point precise.”
According to Cannondale, it leaned heavily on its gravel pro racers for the development of the new SuperX, also taking into account the faster, less technical terrain of European racing – chiefly the UCI Gravel World Series and the World Championships. Senior product manager Mart Otten says: “We have guys like Lachlan, Ted King and Laura King, also Alison Jackson. They can really push the bike to the limit and can influence the designs. The gravel racing scene taking off over the ocean to the rest of the world brings a new dynamic, faster, but also a lower bar. You don’t have to have the same technical skills; they are fast courses, raced in bigger groups, so we want to speak to the rider who is coming from the road. And it doesn’t only need to produce good numbers in the wind tunnel but it also has to look fast standing still.” Otten highlights a “new industrial design language” embodied by the SuperX. “It is the first bike where we introduce this language, or a consistent direction for designs. As of today, what you can see in the SuperSix EVO Gen 4, you’ll see some similarities in styling with the SuperX. It’s very important to keep that consistent look – we want all bikes to be instantly recognisable as Cannondales from the head tube all the way to the rear triangle.”
The SuperX’s lead engineer, Steve Smith, says the SuperX is a refinement of its predecessor, the SuperSix EVO SE, which was of course the 2024 Unbound-winning bike. Despite its formidable pedigree, Smith and his team identified three main areas that could be improved. "Firstly, the aerodynamics. We were able to use our in-house dedicated team that includes Dr Nathan Barry [Cannondale’s lead aerodynamicist]. We used our years of knowledge after developing bikes such as the SystemSix and two generations of SuperSix EVO. This allowed us to achieve new levels of aerodynamic performance with this bike. The team ran countless rounds of CFD and multiple runs at the wind tunnel.” How much faster is the SuperX than the SuperSix EVO SE? “Speeds in gravel racing are going up but they’re still lower than on the road,” explains Smith. “For road bikes we review at 45kph, for SuperX we’re talking about 35kph, the winning speed at Unbound. The new bike comes in at 1.6 watts at 35kph faster than its predecessor.”
Secondly, reduction of the frame weight. Cannondale says that with the LAB71 SuperX, its engineers used an even further advanced fibre and nano-resin composite with exceptional tensile and compressive strength properties “What we’ve achieved with the LAB71 is a 900g frame,” says Smith. “We used our top-level materials and latest manufacturing processes, which allowed us to take 100g out of the frame compared to its predecessor. On the rest of the lineup we have the carbon construction, which has the same level of stiffness and durability as LAB71 but with a little bit of extra weight in a more affordable package.”
The third area was comfort and stiffness. “We all know that in gravel racing comfort is speed,” says Smith, “so the team focused on increasing seated comfort by improving the seat tube, top tube and seatstays while still maintaining stiffness at BB and head tube.” Via Cannondale’s Proportional Response, there’s continuity of ride feel across the sizes: “The new frame features different tube profiles and precisely oriented layers of different types and moduli of carbon optimised for each of the six sizes [46 to 61cm] so that every rider can experience the full potential of SuperX”.
No gravel bike, even a race-orientated model that’s aimed at faster, less technical courses, can claim an improvement without an increase in tyre clearance. The SuperSix EVO SE had space for 45mm tyres, and the SuperX ups it with 51mm at the front and 48mm at the rear, plus 4mm of clearance on each side.
Something that hasn’t changed, however, is the geometry. Smith says he took an ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach. Cannondale’s OutFront geometry pairs a slack head angle with a longer-than-normal 55mm fork offset, which he says was controversial in cyclo-cross when it was first launched but is “perfect for gravel racing”. The bottom bracket height has been slightly adjusted to compensate for bigger tyres, but key measurements such as chainstay length stay the same.
Additionally, like its predecessor, the SuperX uses Cannondale’s proprietary Delta Steerer design. The delta or pizza slice-shaped steerer tube, first introduced in 2023, allows cables to be internally routed from the handlebar into the frame without increasing the frontal area of the head tube. It works with Cannondale’s Conceal Stem, or the one-piece System R-One cockpit of the LAB71 SuperX.
So where does this leave Cannondale’s cyclo-cross offering? There’s no separate, dedicated cyclo-cross bike in the lineup any more, but Cannondale says it will continue to support its cyclo-cross programme and that for the 2025/2026 season all its pro riders will be on the SuperX instead of the SuperSix EVO CX, which will be discontinued along with the SE. Cannondale says the new bike is as optimised for cross as it is for gravel, with the top-tube slope unchanged to leave space in the main triangle for shouldering. The 33mm maximum tyres, as mandated by the UCI, can be run no problem – though they will now look almost comically skinny.
There are three spec levels as standard, a mix of 1x and 2x, with the flagship LAB71 equipped with SRAM Red XPLR at the head of affairs at €14,999/$15,000; the SuperX 2 with Shimano GRX 825 Di2 at €6,899/$6,800 and the SuperX 3 with Shimano GRX 820. The LAB71 frameset without seatpost or cockpit is priced at €4,499/$4,200, frameset €5,499/$5,500. For more, visit Cannondale’s website.
