PARIS-ROUBAIX THREE-PEAT FOR MATHIEU VAN DER POEL AND THE CANYON AEROAD

For immediate release: With victory in the 2025 Hell of the North giving him a rare three wins in a row - putting him into the pantheon of the Paris-Roubaix greats - Mathieu van der Poel not only cemented his reputation as a modern day king of the cobbles, but he also achieved it with a race bike that excels on such unforgiving terrain.

As Mathieu lay waste to a world-class field, dispatching his rivals by floating over the Paris-Roubaix cobblestones at unfathomable speeds, his 2025 Aeroad CFR bore the brunt of that abuse, literally showing the absorbtion and abuse it was taking.

After Mathieu's two previous wins on the Aeroad CFR, this year Canyon came up with something special to explain the development story behind a bike that's racked up countless victories since its introduction in July 2024.

Canyon lifted the lid on the development of the Aeroad by showing exactly where the cobblestone stresses occur, and where its engineers have sought to reinforce the Aeroad's frame to absorb the worst of the impacts.

Using a Tensor simulation plot test to measure stress progression, Canyon took these results and applied them to the artwork to create the Aeroad CFR Tensor edition; the darker colours on the ‘Tensor’ frame’s paint job show areas where the greatest impacts occur.

The Aeroad’s Design Engineer Lukas Birr: “Roubaix is the pinnacle testing ground for a road bike. Smooth tarmac does not put a lot of stress on the bike, but the short distance between these really rough, high cobbles creates a very intense ‘excitement’ frequency. These big impacts go through the frame one after the other, shaking the bike violently and putting stress through it. This means that things could loosen up over the duration of the race: headset play, clamp connections, and so on. If a bike withstands all of this, it withstands every other use case, for sure.”

Needless to say, in this year's edition of the race the 4th generation Aeroad performed flawlessly, much like the 3rd generation Aeroad, which supported Mathieu's Paris-Roubaix victories in 2023 and 2024.

Paris-Roubaix has long been a testing ground for Canyon engineers. For example, the 2021 edition, characterised by wet and rainy conditions, directly influenced the development of the Aeroad CFR. Bikes across the board suffered from the extraordinary attritional conditions that day, but the extreme field test allowed Canyon's engineers developed a new fork and headset that could withstand even the worst weather conditions. In-house testing surpassed Canyon's quality standards by some distance, but the real proof would come when the fork made its race debut. The Aeroad hasn't looked back since.

For more from Paris-Roubaix, check out Canyon's Instagram channel. For more on the Canyon Aeroad, see Canyon.com or for more on Canyon's CFR race programme, see here.