Scott Foil Premium £8,099 | 7.48kg (size 56)

Scott’s aero speed machine is a cut above, finds Alex Ballinger

- Alex Ballinger

If you like to ride fast, then Scott’s aero bike – the Foil – should certainly be near the top of your dream ride list.

Each time Cycling Weekly has tested an updated model, we’ve been blown away by the speed. The bike won an Editor’s Choice award in 2018 and this iteration of the disc Scott Foil Premium does nothing to break the award-winning mould.

But how does this Foil stack up on the road compared with the rivals – the likes of the Specialized Venge, Trek Madone and the Cannondale SystemSix?

The Scott Foil frameset remains a striking aero design, with its chunky tubing around the bottom bracket and headset, fin-like details on the seat tube and fork, and ever-fashionable dropped seatstays, which feature on nearly all of the current top-end race bikes (save Giant’s newest TCR, which took a bold step in shunning the trend).

Scott has maintained a focus on integration, with the aero fork, aero stem and spacers, and all cables hidden almost entirely from view within the frameset – even the Shimano D13 junction box is tucked away in the down tube next to the bottom bracket.

There is a fairly sizeable drawback from all this integration, however, in that the Foil is an extremely fiddly and sometimes impractical bike to actually live with.

I found adjusting the stack on the aero stem way more fiddly than just planting the spacers on top of the stem of a non-aero set-up. Some aero set-ups are easy to adjust, such as the system used on the Canyon Aeroad and Canyon Ultimate, so clearly it could be simpler.