Look 795 Aerolight

The Look 795 Aerolight is an innovative, swift and fast reacting aero road bike although the steep price could dissuade many potential buyers.

How does it ride?

Look described the 795 Aerolight as 'the best aero road bike ever made' when we went to the launch a couple of years ago – although you'd expect it to say that, wouldn't you? 

This is certainly a very accomplished bike that feels most alive when you're soloing off the front of the group or riding fast over flat or rolling terrain. It offers a whole lot of speed for your efforts and maintains that pace well.

> Find your nearest dealer here
> Buy this online here

Although the 795 Aerolight isn't quite up there with the absolute best when it comes to accelerating out of a tight corner or getting on the wheel of an attacker, it still sweeps up to speed quickly enough to leave most others working hard to keep up.

It dispatches hills with the minimum of fuss. There are plenty of lighter bikes out there for this kind of money but the 7.7kg (17lb) of our review bike does include Look's own pedals. Take that into account and it's pretty light, especially for an aero bike fitted with 52mm rims. The 795 Aerolight doesn't quite spring up the slopes but it's certainly up for the fight, impatient to get back to the higher speeds where it can really impress.

The mid-section of the bike feels notably strong when you turn up the power thanks to a huge bottom bracket shell and Look's Zed 3 chainset that's a '100% carbon monobloc construction'. In other words, the two crank arms and the axle are made as one piece, and they feel like it, providing a concrete-hard platform when you hit the pedals with everything you can muster.

The 795 Aerolight feels a lot like many other race bikes in that the ride is on the firm side, but elastomers on Look's own E-Post 2 – the topper on the integrated seatpost – absorb a lot of vibration from the road. You don't climb off this bike at the end of a long ride feeling like you've taken a kicking.

Tell us about the frameset aerodynamics

The frame tubes are made to NACA (National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics) aerofoil profiles. This applies to the seat tube, the down tube, the head tube, the seatstays and the fork – so pretty much everything, then.

All of the tubes are teardrop shaped in cross section, rounded at the leading edge before tapering away towards the rear. The idea, of course, is to manage airflow, reducing turbulence behind the tubes to minimise drag.

The deep seat tube is cut away around the rear wheel in tried and tested time trial manner, and you get an integrated seatpost here so the aero shaping extends uninterrupted almost up to the saddle.

In case you hadn't noticed, the Look 795 Aerolight is all about integration. Aside from that integrated seatpost, this is most evident at the front end.

Rather than using a standard stem clamped to the steerer tube somewhere above the top of the head tube, Look has taken a chunk out of the top of the head tube and sunk its hollow, high modulus carbon fibre Aerostem into the step this creates. The stem sits flush with the sloping top tube, a rubber cover making the transition between the two even smoother.

You see stems flowing into the top tube on some time trial bikes, but there the top tube runs parallel to the ground. An aero road bike is always going to have a longer head tube than a TT bike and so Look has to give the 795 Aerolight a steeply sloping top tube to keep the standover height down to a reasonable level. Without some wind tunnel data, we can't say what effect this has on the aerodynamics.

How do you alter the height of the handlebar, then? Look has thought of that. Adding normal headset spacers underneath the stem would clearly mess up the integration but you can set the angle of the Aerostem from -13° right up to +17°. That equates to 57mm of vertical adjustment on a 110mm stem. You can choose from five other stem lengths.

The stem also features a magnetic cover over its handlebar clamp bolts, and if you go for a Shimano Di2 electronic groupset, the junction box is hidden away inside the top tube. You flip up a little panel to access it. The Di2 battery lives inside the seat tube. It's not compatible with a Campagnolo EPS groupset.

Hardly any cable runs externally, just a small amount between the end of the handlebar tape and the top of the head tube. The cable then heads inside and is guided around the fork steerer and on to its final destinations. Look has actually patented the cable routing design. Although we didn't need to swap cables, Look claims it's a straightforward process from a mechanic's point of view.

Are there any other aero features?

The V-type front brake has arms that sit in windows in the fork legs (as they do on Look's 695 Aerolight). The idea is that from an aerodynamics perspective the brake barely exists. The cable is routed inside so that doesn't disturb the airflow either.

The direct mount rear brake is hidden away too, this time in a less unusual position on the underside of the chainstays. The cable is routed through the down tube and emerges just in front of the bottom bracket shell.

Complicated cable routing can often deaden braking performance but these felt good. I wouldn't say the 795 Aerolight offers the sharpest braking I've ever experienced but I certainly didn't need to give it advanced warning in writing whenever I wanted to scrub off speed. Whether feathering the brakes or coming to a complete halt, they did a sound job, especially working on the Exalith surface of the Mavic Cosmic Pro Carbon wheels on our review bike.

The caveat is that the rear brake positioning does mean that it's in the front line when it comes to water/gunk/bits of dead badger thrown up from the road. You'll certainly find that the rear brake gets covered in muck far quicker than if it was fixed up on the seatstays, and that can affect braking in wet conditions.

> Check out our guide to the fastest aero road bikes here

If this braking arrangement doesn't do it for you, the Look 795 Light – as opposed to our 795 Aerolight – has brakes fitted in conventional positions.

The build

The Look 795 Aerolight comes as a frame and fork (with the integrated front brake) plus the Aerostem, E-Post 2 and the Zed 3 chainset.

The Zed 3 cranks are length adjustable. I could choose between 170mm, 172.5mm and 175mm by swapping around inserts. Swapping from one to another is a bit of a faff, but nothing you can't handle. I can see the design being a benefit to the manufacturer who doesn't need to produce so many different options, and to the dealer who needs to carry less stock, but to the consumer? Not so much. No one changes stem length from ride to ride, do they? I guess it might be useful if you want to sell the bike on at some point.

Our bike was built up with a Shimano Ultegra Di2 electronic groupset and Mavic Cosmic Carbon Pro wheels. They're excellent components although I'd question the speccing of a 50/34-tooth compact chainset on a speed machine like this. It's your shout, though. You can choose whatever you like; it's your frameset.

The 795 Aerolight is also available as a complete bike with a Shimano Dura-Ace mechanical groupset and Mavic Aksium Elite wheels for £6,209.99.

Verdict

An innovative aero road bike that delivers plenty of speed, but only for those with a large budget