Quintana will ride the 2016 Canyon Ultimate CF SLX at the Tour de France, when he will face off with Chris Froome (Team Sky), Alberto Contador (Tinkoff-Saxo) and Vincenzo Nibali (Astana) in an eagerly-awaited battle for the overall title. The Colombian rode the Route du Sud, a four-stage race often used to fine-tune form for the Tour, to get acquainted with his new machine. You can find a full gallery of Quintana’s bike here.

We’ve had the chance to ride it, too, on a 60km loop through the stunning, rolling Pamplona countryside with Quintana and four of his Movistar team-mates. Few bike launches offer enough riding to fully get to grips with a new machine, so consider this a series of first impressions, but we should have an Ultimate CF SLX on its way to us in the not too distant future for a full test on home roads.

The Ultimate CF SLX’s comfort is immediately obvious. We rolled out for out ride across a cobbled car park; not the pavé of Paris-Roubaix by any means but enough lumps and bumps for the deflection offered by the seatpost to announce itself. Get off the bike and lean on the rear end of the saddle and the flex of the seatpost is even more obvious. It is a remarkably smooth ride through the rear end, and, in lowering the seatpost clamp, Canyon have achieved it through a smart engineering solution which has the added bonus of giving the seatpost/seattube junction a clean finish. In our experience ahead of this test ride, the seatpost is still pretty simple to adjust through the new clamp. Just remove the small rubber bung and loosen or tighten with an Allen key or torque wrench, as normal.

Any aerodynamic advantage is hard for us to quantify (Canyon say the frame offers an eight per cent drag saving over its predecessor), not least on a first ride, but on aesthetics alone the Ultimate CF SLX could now be considered a lite version of the Canyon’s all-out aero machine, the Aeroad (which will still be used by Movistar and Katusha). It doesn’t taken on the Aeroad’s aggressive Trident 2.0 profiles – that, Canyon say, would bump up the frame weight too much – but the Ultimate has an aero flavour now, with the downtube and fork significantly reworked as deeper, rounder profiles, while the headtube has a sleek hourglass shape, and there Canyon’s integrated Aerocockpit CF out front.

Canyon say that the key with the Ultimate has been in retaining the frame’s impressive stiffness-to-weight ratio while reducing aerodynamic drag and improving comfort (with the aim to do that by a measure of ten per cent on both counts). “What is a frame worth if it is 600g but as soft as a bouncy castle? That’s for weight weenies,” said Canyon’s carbon fibre engineer, Sebastian Hofer.

And it’s fair to say the Ultimate CF SLX isn’t lacking in stiffness when you put pressure on the pedals, despite the comfort served up by the seatpost. That was most obvious on a five kilometre climb midway through our test ride, which provided a good opportunity to ramp things up, and the Ultimate responded well to accelerations both in and out of the saddle with the bite that you’d hope for – and expect – from a bike like this.

Otherwise, the only other thing to mention at this juncture is that our test bike was equipped with Canyon’s impressive Aerocockpit CF handlebar. It keeps the front-end incredibly tidy, hiding most of the cables in a recess on the underside of the handlebar, and, Canyon say, improves the aerodynamic performance of the bike by a further six per cent. As far as we understand it, most, but not all, of the models that Canyon release when the bike goes on sale in October/November will have this handlebar. Aerodynamic claims aside, handlebar shape is fairly personal but I found the flattened top of the Aerocockpit to provide a surprisingly comfortable position for my hands. The exposed carbon fibre did get a little warm in the sun – but then it was 35 degrees.

That’s it for now, but we’re looking forward to spending more time on the 2016 Canyon Ultimate CF SLX when it arrives in the UK. Canyon have sought to create an all-rounder which marries low weight, stiffness, aerodynamics and comfort in one package, and first impressions suggest they’ve gone some way to doing that.

Website: Canyon