Down the Rabbit Hole: Max's Green Tri-Composite Sarto Cima
Max's first Sarto was a happy accident. His second is a commission: a Cima in green Tri-Composite, and as far as we know the first of its kind in the US.
August 28, 2026
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GEAR DIVE
It Flies: Our Favorite Sarto Builds of 2026, and the Cima Goes Tri-Composite
Once a bike leaves the workshop we mostly hear about it in fair words from its rider: it flies, it rocks, I've never ridden anything like it. With the Cima now out in Tri-Composite, we look back at three Sarto projects from this year, and at how to start one of your own.
It's quiet after a Sarto custom build. Good quiet, until a message lands: a quick missive from the road or the trail, penned after a ride, sometimes from the summit, with photos. The words differ but the feeling is always the same. What a bike. Sarto has just launched the Cima in Tri-Composite, so this seemed a good moment to put some of this year's Sarto projects back under the lights. Two of them already had the copper in them.
Sarto makes everything in-house in Pianiga, west of Venice: the tubes, the fork, the cockpit, and the frame itself, built tube to tube with every joint wrapped by hand. That’s why a Sarto rides the way it does, and why each one can be made to your geometry rather than the nearest size. A good few went out under the Regroup Custom banner this year. These are the ones we documented along the way, each with a link in case it’s the one you’ve been thinking about, and then the news from Venice.
The white Raso: fit first, build second
It started with a phone call about shoes. The rider had been on a Pinarello and circling an upgrade: custom, Italian, built precisely for her. For riders outside the industry’s average size, that last part isn’t a luxury. Stock geometry is drawn around an imagined ideal, and the compromises of shrinking a frame can quietly undo everything that makes a premium bike worth the money.
So the sequence mattered. She came to Tempe for a full Regroup FIT with Barry before a single part was specced, and a saddle mapping settled on a Form saddle for how it worked with her body. Sarto then built the Raso to her numbers: a 36cm one-piece bar and stem, 160mm cranks, and a carbon layup tuned to her profile, style and physique. SRAM RED AXS with a Quarq, ENVE SES 2.2 wheels for the climbs between Colorado and Palm Springs, 30mm Vittoria Corsa cotton tires. The finish is white, and somehow deeper than white. The questions, sighs and plain wows from visitors while it sat in the shop said the rest.
The Blue Thread: a Raso TC specified down to the inner tube
This build arrived with the destination already chosen, and it was Venice. The client, in Dallas-Fort Worth, knew about Tri-Composite, about Sarto’s Forged carbon junctions, about the factory in the Veneto, and he’d read wheel data the way other people read stock tickers. What he needed was someone on the other end of the line who cared as much as he did.
The frame is a Raso TC in Sarto’s blue Tri-Composite: metallic copper filaments woven through the carbon across the stays, down tube, top tube and seat tube, helping to quiet vibration and throwing a blue thread that catches the light differently at every angle. At the bottom bracket, the head tube and the seat tube junction, Sarto’s Forged carbon adds strength where the power goes in, speckled like marble. From there the build goes straight to the summit: Lightweight Meilenstein Art wheels at 1,190 grams, SRAM Red AXS with a Quarq, CeramicSpeed’s BB Alpha, a blue CeramicSpeed OSPW that echoes the weave, Sarto’s own one-piece cockpit, and 30mm Corsa Pros on Tubolito tubes, a nod to tradition. A fit check with Barry at delivery moved him from 170mm cranks to 165s. It left Tempe in a Sarto-branded Buxum Box.
Max's green Cima: down the rabbit hole
When bikes are this good, why stop at one? Max’s first Sarto was bought on something like a whim. The second was a commission, a Cima, Sarto’s new road bike. Enrico Sarto’s brief to himself was a bike that feels lighter rather than merely reads lighter: shorter chainstays, diamond-inspired tube shapes, and the tube-to-tube construction every Sarto gets.
The headline was the finish. This Cima wears Tri-Composite in green through the frame and the fork, and when it landed in August, Sarto hadn’t yet announced the Tri-Composite Cima. As far as we know it was the first in the United States, and we said so with a suitable hedge. The build: SRAM Red AXS with 50/37 rings and a 10-33 cassette, a CeramicSpeed bottom bracket and OSPW, a Darimo Nexum Drag cockpit, a Bjørn Setka 3D-printed saddle, ENVE SES 4.5 Pro wheels and 30mm Corsa Pro gumwalls that pop against the green. A week in, Max put it in four short sentences: it climbs better than anything, it’s smoother, it rips downhill, it’s snappy.
The Cima TC, at a glance
That green Cima was ahead of the line. This month Sarto made the Tri-Composite Cima official, in four colors: Blue Hour, Raw Ridge, Alpenglow and Treeline. Same frame, same geometry, with copper filament woven through the carbon and the color carried in the weave itself rather than the paint. The bike in the photos above and below is Blue Hour.
In brief:
- Frame: Sarto Cima in Tri-Composite, carbon fiber interlaced with copper filament, in a finer weave than the original Raso TC
- Geometry and handling: the Cima’s, with the diamond-profile head tube and down tube, made to your numbers or in stock sizes XXS to XXL
- Spec: T47 x 86 bottom bracket · 1.5 inch headset · integrated hidden-screw cockpit · three seatpost setbacks · UDH · tires up to 35mm
- Colors: Blue Hour · Raw Ridge · Alpenglow · Treeline, the color running through the weave itself
- Paint: Minimal, Flavoured, or your own design through Sarto’s Tailor program
- Built to order with Sarto, assembled complete at our workshop in Tempe. Cima builds from $15,999; we’ll price a TC on your spec
The Cima now speaks Tri-Composite
Sarto’s own line for the launch is the right one: the Cima now speaks Tri-Composite. The weave is a refined version of the one on the blue Raso above, carbon interlaced with copper filament and tightened to a finer pattern, so the surface holds more consistency under stress and keeps the depth of finish that made the Raso TC unmistakable. The geometry, the handling and the diamond-profile head and down tubes are the Cima’s. Every tube is still hand-laminated and every joint still hand-wrapped in Pianiga. Nothing about the process changed; what changed is what it produces. It launches in four colors, Blue Hour, Raw Ridge, Alpenglow and Treeline, and the color runs through the weave rather than the paint, so it shifts with the light and holds up over years, not seasons.
So the weave that ran through this year’s builds now has a Cima of its own. If one of these three has been on your mind, in any of the four colors or with a paint of your own, start with the button below and we’ll pick it up from there. Every build begins with a conversation, usually over a coffee in Tempe, and as Max would tell you, it may not be your last. And when yours is out in the world, send us a note from the summit. We keep them.
