New Cannondale Synapse: Expanded endurance-bike technology

With the new Cannondale Synapse, the brand is blending two types of tech. There’s gee-whiz stuff that excites anyone into road bikes, whether they are into full-on race machines or endurance/all-road rigs like the Synapse. There’s also tech that may not get the heart beating with as much excitement, but I’ll argue it will go a long way to making your rides more enjoyable than any feature your bike might share with a pro roadie.

The race-bike technology on the Cannondale Synapse

While the Synapse is an endurance bike, a fast road bike that’s not made for pros but for the rest of us, it does share features with its racing counterparts. Let’s take a look at the Cannondale Synapse Lab71 model in the new lineup. The Lab71 designation means that this Synapse has all the best bits. Its Hi-Mod carbon-fibre formula brings its frame weight down to less than 1,000 g in a size 56, 150 g lighter than the standard carbon layup. It sports SRAM’s Red AXS groupset and rolls on Reserve 42|49 wheels with DT Swiss 180 hubs. At the front, the one-piece SystemBar R-One carbon handlebar cuts through the air.

You’ll find all of these features on the latest top-end racer by Cannondale, the SuperSix Evo. There are, however, a few other parallels between the road and new endurance bike. In 2019, when the third generation of the SuperSix debuted, it featured truncated airfoil tube shapes to improve its aerodynamics. The latest Synapse also has that shaping throughout its structure. “The Synapse now has drag figures that are basically on par with the previous third-generation SuperSix Evo, which, from all of our testing, would be an extremely competitive bike if it was still in the pro peloton,” says Nathan Barry, Cannondale’s senior design engineer.

What endurance and all-road mean to Cannondale

For some brands, endurance and all-road mean the same thing. For others, the terms indicate slightly different styles of bike. For some, “endurance” conjures up earlier bikes that entered into the space that the Synapse sits within. Those endurance bikes put you in a more upright position, which boosted your comfort on long rides, but they came with handling that was noticeably more sluggish than the race-focused bikes. Enter the term “all-road.” It can mean endurance geometry, lively handling and clearance for wider tires. Endurance without the negative connotation. At Cannondale, endurance means all those things I listed for all-road. As for the term all-road, the folks behind the Synapse use it for light gravel.

“Synapse was first and foremost developed as a road bike,” says Will Gleason, road product manager. “We make a lot of really high-performance gravel bikes, so we did want to keep the Synapse positioned as a road bike. It handles great with 32 or 34c tires. It really shines on that pavement performance. It’s snappy. It’s light. It handles the way a road bike is expected to handle. That being said, we don’t want to limit the customer. By building the tire clearance it has, it comes up to the edge of what gravel bikes can do. If you do want to treat it as an all-road bike, you’re totally capable of putting big tires on it.”

Comfort is a significant part of an endurance bike. The D-shaped seatpost adds compliance to the ride, as does the shape of the seat tube and the frame’s latest carbon-fibre layup. Overall, the bike is 20 per cent more compliant, according to the company.

You can race the Synapse. It even has a UCI sticker. But unlike earlier iterations of Cannondale’s endurance bike, there’s a slim chance of it appearing at Paris-Roubaix. Gleason says even the brutal Hell of the North is now the territory of race bikes like the SuperSix. That means with endurance bikes, designers can build more versatile machines that you can ride in an even wider range of scenarios than those the pros face throughout their racing calendar.

Tire clearance on the Cannondale Synapse

Each model in the new Cannondale Synapse lineup ships with 32c tires. You can go wider if you’d like: 48 mm at the fork and 42 mm between the stays. But if you have a 48c tire, it still might not work for your Synapse. Remember, tire widths are nominal. Once you fit the rubber to a wheel, you could see a slight difference. Also, a front derailleur can affect the available clearance for the rear wheel. Fenders, which you can put on the Synapse, eat up space, too. Cannondale says you need at least a 4-mm gap between the tires and any part of the bike.

The features you need (that might even be cooler than Kammtail tubes)

“Synapse has always actually been a bit of a technology driver for us,” Gleason says. “It was actually our first full carbon frame, our first dropbar disc bike, the first road bike to fit big tires. It’s been driving technology in our dropbar space that you then see appearing in the SuperSix and our other bikes.”

The new tech in the new bike isn’t for the pros. It really could help out riders like you and me. Just this past weekend, the night before a ride, I was engaged in a familiar ritual: looking for power adapters and cords, some USB A, some USB C. I charged a head unit, front light, rear light with radar and the battery for the rear derailleur. With some of the new Synapses, you’d only have to charge one battery. Well, that’s not exactly true; it’s still best to power up your phone and your head unit, but the bike can run on one battery. If that one battery helps you get out riding more quickly, that’s a better feature than a frame 150 g lighter than another, I say.

With the launch of the previous Synapse, Cannondale equipped the bike with SmartSense, which included an integrated headlight, rear radar and light and wheel sensor. That’s all on the new Synapse Lab71. With the second generation of SmartSense, you don’t see the battery as it’s now inside the down tube. The front light, made by LightSkin, is sleeker than the previous model. The rear light and radar unit continues to be handled by Garmin. Another new feature: SmartSense 2.0 can power the SRAM AXS derailleurs.

You might be concerned that the lights will suck all the juice out of the battery and leave you stuck in one gear. The team at Cannondale thought of that. “There are two low power modes that help perverse battery life for shifting,” says Sascha Demetris, connected components product manager. “At 10 per cent power, your lights get dimmed. At 5 per cent, they’re turned off. Because this battery is a lot bigger than an AXS battery, even 5 per cent of the battery is roughly the equivalent of one fully charged AXS battery. So that 5 per cent, well, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but it gets you pretty far.”
You can get at the SmartSense battery via the door in the down tube. There is also storage in that part of the frame that Cannondale calls the StashPort. The StashBag holds ride essentials neatly within the port.

If the SmartSense battery is flush with power and your phone isn’t, you can charge your mobile via a USB C cable. It cannot power Shimano Di2 components. The Synapse Carbon 1, 2, 4 and 5 models are all built with Shimano groupsets. The models are SmartSense compatible, but not SmartSense equipped.

Every bike comes with a wheel sensor, which is the only tech carried over from the first generation of SmartSense. It wakes up the system when you start riding. It transmits speed, distance and route information, as well as service reminders to the Cannondale app. With that app, you can adjust many of the SmartSense features.

Cannondale Synapse Canadian prices and notable spec

Model	Spec	Price
Synapse LAB71	SRAM Red AXS with power meter, Reserve 42|49 wheels, Vittoria Corsa Pro Contol tires	$22,099
Synapse LAB71 frameset	n/a	$8,099
Synapse Carbon 1	Shimano Ultegra Di2 with 4Iiii Precision 3+ Pro power meter, Reserve 42|49 wheels, Vittoria Corsa Pro Contol tires	$12,899
Synapse Carbon 2	Shimano Ultegra Di2 , DT Swiss ERC 45, wheels, Vittoria Rubino Pro IV tires	$10,099
Synapse Carbon 4	Shimano 105 Di2, DT Swiss R470 wheels, Vittoria Rubino Pro IV tires	$6,299
Synapse Carbon 5	Shimano 105 mechanical, DT Swiss R470 wheels, Vittoria Rubino Pro IV tires	$4,899