Will Giant's 10th gen TCR be its last?

With the new frame claimed to be 4.2 watts faster than the previous TCR, the gap to Giant's Propel aero bike is getting ever smaller

- Stefan Abram 

Twenty-eight years after the platform's controversial debut for World Tour Team ONCE - as the first bike to feature a sloping top tube - we are now on the 10th generation of Giant's groundbreaking TCR.

It might look like not much has changed at first glimpse it would appear it's not a grand departure from the previous generation - but across the bike there were multiple updates and tweaks to get to grips with at its recent launch in Taiwan.

The most obvious of these is the (almost) full internal cable routing, with the cables running along the underside of the stem and down through the head tube. Regarding the performance, the latest frameset is claimed to be 10% lighter, five watts faster, and fractionally stiffer than its predecessor.

But if you take the 'total system efficiency' into consideration, Giant says that the new TCR is as much as 12 watts faster than the previous model. That is a big difference and a bold claim, which we'll look at a little further on.

As for where the TCR stands in Giant's road bike range, Andrew Jukaitis, Giant's PR senior global product marketing manager, is clear that "Propel is [Giant's] premier aero road race product, but when it comes to the ultimate in stiffness to weight and adding aerodynamics, TCR is the new sheriff in town."

But the differences have narrowed. The new TCR is 155 grams lighter than the Propel and five watts slower. It's hard to imagine what the distinction would be between the next generations of each platform and Jukaitis candidly admits this: "The question that we will be asking in the three to five-year plan for both those products is: when do the two combine?"