Check out the Colnago C40 Gold Limited Edition

The Colnago C40 was a ground-breaker when it was launched in 1994, showing that carbon was a great material for bikes raced at the highest level – even in the toughest of conditions. It became the first carbon bike ridden to victory at Paris-Roubaix the following year, and was the model the Mapei team used to secure all three places on the podium in 1996. This C40 Gold – which we saw when visiting Colnago recently – is one of a limited series of just 400 that was produced in 2000.

Carbon-fibre bikes have been ridden to every major race victory for years, but things were different back in the 1990s. Colnago had made several carbon bikes before the C40, but the material had yet to take over fully, and many people doubted its suitability for tough races like Paris-Roubaix. That all changed when Mapei’s Franco Ballerini won over the cobbles in 1995. In fact, the C40 was ridden to five Paris-Roubaix victories in six years.

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Rather than being a monocoque produced in a mould, the C40 – C for ‘carbon’, 40 to denote Colnago’s 40th year in business – was made with tubes bonded into lugs. Most carbon-fibre bikes produced these days are monocoques, but Colnago still uses a lugged construction on its C68 road and gravel bikes.

Colnago made lugs of various angles and used different lengths of tubing to produce bikes in a huge number of frame sizes. Metal parts were still used for parts like the dropouts and the threaded sleeve for the bottom bracket, but the lugs and tubes were carbon fibre and Colnago claimed a frame weight of 1kg (size 54cm). There are far lighter bikes out there these days, of course, but the C40 was lower than anything else out there at the time.

Company chief Ernesto Colnago is quoted as saying, “When we built the C40 we were the only ones to build carbon frames and all the mechanics and competitor technicians were saying that they would be too dangerous to use on cobbled roads, especially with the straight carbon forks. There was a company that wanted to fit suspension forks on the bicycle, but I wasn't going to have suspension forks on the C40. 

“The night before Paris- Roubaix I had Mr Squinzi, the Mapei boss, on the phone to me raising his concerns about using such a delicate-looking thing. I told him that we’d done all of the tests that we could on the frame and the fork and we were certain there would be no problem. I had to take personal responsibility for what was going to happen and I spent all night worrying about it, barely able to sleep. But when I heard that there were four Mapei riders in the break, I knew I could relax.”

Naturally, no one is saying that Mapei riders won because of the Colnago C40 – we can all agree that there were a helluva lot of other factors influencing race results in the 1990s – but it was a key bike in the rise of carbon fibre, both in the pro peloton and beyond.

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In common with other bikes of the era, the C40 featured rim brakes, mechanical shifting, and external cable routing, and in 2000 Colnago released the C40 Gold pictured here, in a limited series of 400.

Its decals and head badge were gold, while the bike was built up with a Campagnolo Record 10-speed groupset, 45mm-deep carbon wheels, a handlebar and stem from ITM, and a San Marco Gold saddle. Oh, and those Vittoria tubular tyres: they’re just 19mm wide. Ouch!

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