Tour Tech 2016: Fortuneo-Vital Concept’s Look 795 Light

Riders from the French Professional Continental team Fortuneo-Vital Concept are racing the Tour de France on Look 795 Lights. This is the bike belonging to Anthony Delaplace. 

We reviewed the Look 795 Aerolight, a close relative of the Look 795 Light, here on road.cc earlier in the year. 

The frame tubes are made to NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) aerofoil profiles. This applies to the seat tube, the down tube, the head tube, the seatstays and the fork – so pretty much everything, then.

The deep seat tube is cut away around the rear wheel in a tried and tested time trial/aero road bike manner, and you get an integrated seatpost here so the aero shaping extends uninterrupted to the saddle.

Rather than using a standard stem clamped to the steerer tube somewhere above the top of the head tube, Look has taken a chunk out of the top of the head tube and sunk its hollow, high modulus carbon fibre Aerostem into the step this creates. The stem sits flush with the sloping top tube, a rubber cover making the transition between the two even smoother.

You see stems flowing into the top tube on some time trial bikes, but there the top tube runs parallel to the ground. An aero road bike is always going to have a longer head tube than a TT bike and so Look gives the 795 Aerolight a steeply sloping top tube to keep the standover height down to a reasonable level. 

Some people struggle with the look of this frame. Fair enough. It’s very unusual. Most people seem to like this finish though. It’s intended to mark 30 years since brand’s first Tour de France win with Greg Lemond, a nod towards the La Vie Claire jersey of that era. Click here for a complete story on this limited edition finish. 

Rather than having spacers underneath the stem to adjust the height of the handlebar, Look specs its Aerostem. You can adjust it from -13° right up to +17°. That equates to 57mm of vertical adjustment on a 110mm stem. You can choose from six different stem lengths.

If you go for a Shimano Di2 electronic groupset, the junction box can be hidden away inside the top tube, a little panel over the top. Fortuneo-Vital Concept uses Di2 but it keeps the junction box external, held on the side of the stem. This is to allow easier on-the-fly gear adjustment.

The Fortuneo-Vital Concept bikes are fitted with Look’s ADH handlebars. The top sections are designed to be aerodynamically efficient and the cables pass internally. They’re a very compact design with a drop of just 120mm and a reach of 75mm. They’re lightweight too: a claimed 250g (for a 42cm width). The computer mount that holds the Garmin is Look's own.

The Look 795 Aerolight that we reviewed here on road.cc has a front brake that’s integrated into the fork and a rear brake that’s positioned below/behind the bottom bracket. The idea, of course, is to reduce drag.

The Look 795 Light that the Fortuneo-Vital Concept team uses, however, comes with brakes in conventional positions at the front of the fork and on the seatstays. This means they’re much simpler to adjust while on the move, and life is easier if a rider ever has to take a wheel from a neutral service vehicle which might have a different rim width from the team’s own wheels.

Speaking of the wheels, these are American Classic Carbon 58s, the 58 referring to the depth of the carbon-fibre rims in millimetres.  

As mentioned, the Fortuneo-Vital Concept Look 795 Lights are built up with Shimano Dura-Ace Di2 groupsets while the chainset is Look’s own Zed 2 design. This is carbon-fibre with adjustable crank lengths.  

The pedals are Look’s own too: Keo Powers. These ones won’t send any power measurement, though, because they’re lacking what Look calls the ‘radios’ to transmit the data.

The saddle is a Selle Italia Team Edition design and the bottle cages are Elite Custom Races made from glass fibre-reinforced polyamide.