Bikes of the UCI WorldTour 2012: Scott Foil of GreenEdge

Credit where credit is due; the arrival of the GreenEdge professional team with both men's and women's squads is about as exciting as you can get introducing as it does both a new team which is always good but also what is in effect an Australian national squad with 18 out of the 30 riders coming from Down Under. The only thing taking the edge off it for us Brits is that it's, you know, an Australian team, the mortal enemy in all sports that matter and in this one, of cycling, there's not much debate that the dratted Aussies have done even better than Britain with their gradual rise to prominence over the last twenty years.

Meanwhile Scott, the makers of the Foil road and Plasma time-trial bikes and the suppliers of fast mounts for the new GreenEdge team are not so new to the highest levels of international bike racing. They've been out of it for a season since Specialized took over the contract for what turned out to be the defunct Highroad team but Mark Cavendish and team mates rode the pre-production prototypes of the Foil when it was still called the F01 project from the Tour de France in their final year with Scott in 2010 and didn't do half bad.

Although aerodynamics is hardly a new concept for racing bicycles, Scott can fairly claim that the F01 now named Foil in production form was the beginning of the latest big aero development on standard non-time-trialling race bikes and one that's clearly born fruit now that Specialized with the Venge and Cervelo's S5 are also prominent in the peloton with plenty more wannabes surely following behind.

The objective of the Foil, according to Scott, was to combine the light weight of the long-running and successful Addict carbon frame with the literally cutting-edge aerodynamics of the Plasma. At still well under 1,000 grams and with those distinctive truncated Kamm tail frame members saving 4-5% watts required due to the wind-cheating benefit, the Foil surely most successfully combines the 'technical' - aka 'ugly' looks of the Cervelo with the classical lines of, say, the Bianchi Oltre. "It's a beaut," as they're reputed to say in Australia and for what it's worth on a technical note, that internal seatpost clamp is our favourite for ingenuity.