How the Madone Gen 8 was designed, tested and brought to life

This new do-it-all road bike is the culmination of years of hard work leveraging Trek's unique resources.

Here's a little secret about Trek's all-new Madone Gen 8. It's designed for all kinds of racers, from those who love long, brutal climbs to those who want to pump out the power meter, but there was one person the engineers were most interested in pleasing: Mads Pedersen.

There are good reasons why the Lidl-Trek rider deserves this honor. First, he's a very good bike racer. Pedersen has won a World Championship, multiple Classic races, at least one stage of three Grand Tours, and the Vuelta a Espana points jersey. He's an influential leader within the team. If Mads likes something, everyone listens.

But in addition to his athletic gifts, he's also a savvy ride tester. Anyone who's heard his post-race interviews knows he doesn't mince words. He's honest and forthright, but also fair. And he's probably as meticulous and in tune with his equipment as any cyclist in the world. His feedback is the barometer by which not only Trek bikes, but also helmets and other products are judged.

Mads Pedersen won his first WorldTour race on a Madone Generation 8, winning the first stage of the Critorium du Dauphin earlier this month. Photo: Dario Bellinghelli/Getty Images

“You can trust his honesty,” says Scott Daubert, who oversees equipment for Trek's race programs. “He doesn't ask for something he doesn't need, and he's thoughtful about what he asks for. There's something he wants to make for the consumer, and when he picks it, you know we're all on the same page.”

During a team visit to Trek headquarters in Waterloo, Wisconsin, last October, Trek's road bike engineers took the honored Danish rider for a final road test of the new Madone. After two years of simulations, prototyping and testing, the bike's geometry was refined and final decisions had to be made about the carbon laminates. Pedersen was already in his off-season; he hadn't ridden his bike for several days after a trip to China. At the time, he was worried he wouldn't do the bike justice, especially on rural Wisconsin roads that aren't WorldTour-level.

Tony Gallopin tests an early version of the Madone Gen 8 at team camp in December 2022.

Trek design engineer Adam Bird handed Pedersen the first of two laminate options, the one he secretly hoped Pedersen would prefer. Bird and his in-house ride testers unanimously agreed that it was the best version of the bike, but he also had another version with a different carbon layup ready, just to be sure.

“Of course, we were nervous because he didn't know what was what. We just gave him two bikes,” says Bird, “and he didn't know that one of them was the one we wanted him to like, so there was a chance he'd pick the other one or not like either one. We were going to make it work, but it would mean more work and it would affect production.”

“But after his first ride, he loved it, so we were like, 'OK, let's go for a ride.'

A prototype frame ready for circle, square and triangle testing by Trek's in-house riders.

That might sound like Trek's engineers defeated the final boss a little easily, and maybe they did. But that's because they'd been preparing for this moment for a long time. Pedersen's road tests were one of the final steps in a long, slow iteration process. The goal from the start was to create the “ultimate race bike,” blending two of their road racing platforms—the ultra-light Monda and the ultra-fast Madone—into one do-it-all speed machine. Making two great bikes even better at the same time is exactly as painfully difficult as it sounds.

Research and development for the new Madone technically began in the summer of 2021. At the time, Trek was planning on introducing the fourth-generation Monda, due for release in 2023, but during the development process, their engineers realized they could significantly improve the bike's pure speed. Rather than trying to make an even lighter Monda with little aerodynamic improvement, they pursued their ultimate goal: a bike that combined weight with aerodynamic advantage.

Adam Bird on-site at the 2022 road team camp in December.

Trek's road engineers resumed work on this goal in late 2021, cutting an aluminium frame and putting it through wind tunnel testing to further refine the already class-leading design of the Madone Gen 7. Once the frame geometry was set, they built tooling that allowed them to create carbon prototype frames for road testing.

The next step was to assemble an A-team of elite ride testers from Trek HQ. The Bicycle Company is full of fast, dedicated riders who are happy to help in the pursuit of science. The core group was narrowed down to Trek Store Design Manager Justin Marshall, Road Bike and Project One Director Jordan Rosin, former Road Product Manager Max Ackermann, and Daubert, who won the U.S. cyclocross title last December in addition to his duties at the Trek Race Shop. Not only are these riders fast, they're also well-known for their equipment acumen and ability to sense and call out subtle differences in ride quality that come from small changes.

Scott Daubert testing the Madone Gen 8.

“Trek wanted a lighter Madone, so it made sense to say, 'OK, let's focus on making the bike lighter through aerodynamics,'” Daubert says. “There were no limitations.”

The detectability group conducted its first road test in California in November 2022. There, they conducted the first round of “Circle, Square, Triangle.” To avoid introducing even a little bit of unconscious bias into the riders' feedback, the engineers did not label the bikes “A, B, C” or “1, 2, 3.” Riders would ride the circle and the square back to back and state which one they liked better. They would then repeat the same process with the square vs. triangle and the triangle vs. circle, hoping that a clear winner would emerge from the group.

Keeping the bike setup consistent throughout the testing was paramount in the process, making sure that each time a rider swapped bikes they were using the exact same wheels and tires, and that the bike fit was perfectly aligned, from saddle height to stem length. Bird recalls that after one test ride, Rosin was hesitant to give feedback, because the distance between the brake levers and grips was different from bike to bike.

Early IsoFlow.

Trek engineers are empirical thinkers, but bicycle design is not an exact science.

“It can be contradictory at times – one time you don't like the bike and another time you love it, or vice versa,” Daubert says. “It's really frustrating when you're trying to hone your detection skills, but that's the way we are.”

The bike first appeared in front of Riddle-Trek riders at a team camp in Spain in December 2022. Otto Vergaerde and former road captain Tony Gallopin brought out a prototype bike (which didn't have a Madone, Monda or any other name at that point) to do their own circle, square and triangle testing. Their feedback was largely in line with that of the in-house group, which was a significant advancement: the Waterloo test riders realized that the mostly European-based pros felt they needed to win.

A bike being serviced during a camp test ride.

Over the next few months, the in-house group did a series of test rides at Wildcat State Park, about two hours from Trek HQ. Wisconsin may not have climbs to rival the Alps or the Pyrenees, but Wildcat's repeatable switchbacks were more than enough. There, the riders continued the circle-square-triangle process, mostly to test new laminates and subtle frame tweaks.

The engineers' biggest worry wasn't making an already-fast bike even lighter. The Madone Gen 7 gave the Gen 8 team a solid foundation on which to apply the weight-saving techniques they'd developed. Early prototypes received overwhelmingly positive feedback on both climbs and sprints, suggesting Trek had achieved its ultimate goal. But there was still one aspect where the older platform had the advantage:

Otto Vergaarde is picking up the pace.

“The feedback was very positive throughout the day,” Bird said, “and at the end of the day they compared it to the Madone VII. Max [Ackermann] “I thought this descent was super technical and I wasn't pushing the bike hard enough, but then I got on the Gen 7 and it felt like I was on rails.”

Bird says there was no eureka moment to modify the Madone Gen 8's downhill performance. Instead, his team set out to the painstaking task of increasing or decreasing stiffness in specific areas of the bike, testing the changes and gradually reworking the ride until the bike truly did everything well.

“After the first few rides, I knew the product wasn't good enough. I kept comparing it to the Madone Gen 7, and the new bike just couldn't hold a candle to it,” Daubert says. “Then finally there came a day when I was like, 'OK, this is it. This is an improvement on the old bike.'”

Our in-house ride crew taking a break in California.

The in-house group did a final test ride in North Carolina in August 2023, where veteran road riders who have ridden competitors' bikes joined the group and gave the Madone rave reviews. The same two versions of the bike that Pedersen rode in October were brought to team camp in Spain in December, where other top Riddle-Trek riders, including Elisa Longo Borghini, Giulio Ciccone and Jasper Stuyven, saw exactly what Pedersen and everyone else had experienced.

Longo Borghini had such faith in Trek's process that he was reluctant to try a second version.

“I said, 'Well, I want to give people options,' and she said, 'Why do I have to? This is it,'” Bird says. “Riders were sitting on the Madone Gen 8 and saying, 'I love the way this goes downhill.' Over a year ago, we were thinking, 'How do we solve this?' And now we have something great.”

Bird estimates that 30 to 40 prototypes were built for the eighth-generation Madone, including models built specifically for wind tunnel testing, and about 25 different carbon laminates, eight of which were used for road testing.

Finished product.

All that time, effort, and endless testing of circles, squares, and triangles resulted in a truly special bike. It's received near-universal praise from Trek's most demanding customers: the pros whose livelihoods depend on world-class equipment. In the end, after the design was finalized and we moved into production in early 2024, they had only one complaint about the bike:

“They wanted to ride it earlier,” Daubert says. “They actually asked to race Roubaix and Flanders this year, months before Trek would have been able to supply them with enough bikes. But they called Trek and said, 'Hey, we want to ride this now, can you change the starting point?'”

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