Eurobike 2009 road bikes: Pinarello, Trek, Litespeed, Cannondale and more

Our first gallery of road bike pictures from Eurobike 2009 contains shots of the latest bikes from Pinarello, Litespeed, Trek, Kestrel, Cannondale, Look.

Trends so far? Well custom paint jobs are on offer - specced through their respective websites by Pinarello and Trek, as predicted there are more BB30 bottom brackets and more chromed inset seat collars, a lot more of those as first pioneered on the Orbea Orca. Using the same moulds to make bikes in different grades of carbon also seems to be in favour – this has always been done to some extent but in these tough times manufacturers are making a virtue out of a necessity both for themselves and their customers – Cannondale and Litespeed both have what are ostensibly identical bikes with models in differents grades of carbon fibre in the Slice and the new Archon respectively. 

The new Pinarello Dogma 60.1 is certainly the most eye-catching bike we've seen. The deal here is that, according to Pinarello, it's the world's first completely asysmetric bike. No they aren't including the bars, saddle and pedals in that claim, but they reckon all the tube profiles on the new Dogma are asymetric which they say will give it a performance advantage. Hard to tell the difference at first sight on a bike that wasn't that asymetric to start with. As to whether it's the world's first? We're not sure – I'm pretty sure if you search back on our coverage of the CORE Bike Show back in February we featured a Quintana Roo triathlon bike that QR were claiming was completely asysmetric - you could spot the difference in the tube profiles too.

The new Pinarello gets its name from the high modulus Torayaca carbon from which it is made and it's other big selling point is that through the Pinarello website you can spec pretty much any colour you want – even lime green with glittery inserts should you so choose, Lilac? Yep in fact, it looks a lot better than it sounds, my favourite colour though was the bronze/gold one. Nice. No word on pricing but "lots" should cover it.

Trek are also pushing the colour customisation option with the Project One Trek Madones – they too had a display of all the wonderful things you can do – and there are a lot in terms of frame colours and matching accessory packages. Naturally they also had Lance Armstrong's Livestrong Madone on show and Alberto Contador's Tour winning machine - complete with race number and cool graphic denoting the three grand tour jersey's he's won, none of your world championship stipes for Alberto.

Pics here too of the new Litespeed Archon – in Carbon. This bike is guaranteed to cause a bit of and we've got a separate story to follow.