How America's No. 1 bicycle company secretly tested the world's lightest production road bike, then unveiled it the day before the Tour de France

Trek Emonda SLR 9 2018 bike launch Contador

Most major bike brands adore the Tour de France, and for good reason. Millions watch the three-week race from the roadside and hundreds of millions more watch it on TV, making it the ideal time to roll out new bikes and cycling gear.

But brands don't just introduce new bikes at the race. Bikes need to be test-ridden, tweaked, and, yes, raced. At the same time, companies want to preserve the excitement of a new bike, build hype, and ensure customers keep buying the existing model that's soon to be replaced.

Trek Bicycle Corp.'s launch this past summer of its latest super-high-end road bike was a good example of how brands try to conduct under-the-radar real-world testing before unveiling bikes in prime time. The day before this year's Tour it debuted one of the most talked-about new bikes, its redesigned Émonda SLR 9, an ultralight carbon climber for its Trek-Segafredo team.

But it came only after a year or so of redesigning the bike from its previous iteration and trying its best to test it in stealth mode with some of the world's best cyclists.

In the run-up to this year's Tour, Business Insider got an inside look at how America's leading bike company readied and debuted one of the most important bikes in its over 40-year history.

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It all began for us with a cryptic email from Trek inviting a handful of journalists to attend a private event at its headquarters, in Waterloo, Wisconsin, in early June, less than a month before the Tour's start in Düsseldorf, Germany. The invite concluded by saying it was an embargoed event, meaning no teaser previews or "spy shots" on social media until June 30, the day of the official launch.

So about three weeks before we headed to the Tour we made the drive from Chicago to Waterloo, wondering what lay in store. Almost certainly Trek would be announcing a new bike — but which one? A redesign or a completely new one? Or something else?

We arrived at Trek HQ in time for the opening presentation. The large building, sleek and modern, houses about a thousand employees (another thousand or so work at offices and stores around the world). Trek says everyone is encouraged to get out and ride during the workday, and employees we talked to said the company has a "very generous" employee discount on bikes and gear. Trek is the only billion-dollar bike company in the US.

See the rest of the story at Business Insider