IN BRIEF
Photos of unannounced Shimano Dura-Ace pedals circulated on Instagram before being deleted. According to road.cc, which received the screenshots from a reader, the packaging reads “Dura-Ace SPD-SLR” — one letter more than the SPD-SL that Shimano has used on the road for twenty years. The British outlet also notes cleats that appear square, and therefore without the fore/aft adjustment of the current system, and a caption announcing a stack height of 12.5 mm against 14.6 mm on today’s PD-R9100. As of the date of road.cc’s article, Shimano had made no public announcement about these pedals, and road.cc relies on no document from the brand.
| Model code spotted | Dura-Ace PD-R9300 (according to road.cc) |
| Wording on the packaging | “Dura-Ace SPD-SLR” (according to road.cc) |
| Claimed stack height | 12.5 mm, according to the caption of the deleted post |
| Current stack height | 14.6 mm on the Dura-Ace PD-R9100 SPD-SL |
| Cleats | square-looking, with no visible fore/aft adjustment |
| Source of the images | deleted Instagram post from a Dutch bike shop |
| Shimano’s position | no public announcement as of the date of the article |
Some leaks are worth only a line, and others touch on a standard that has been in place for twenty years. This one belongs to the second category: according to road.cc, a photo of the packaging taken from a since-deleted Instagram post reads “Dura-Ace SPD-SLR”, and not SPD-SL — the name Shimano has given its road pedal system since the early 2000s.
What the Dura-Ace pedal leak shows
Context matters, and road.cc sets it out straight away: the arrival of a new Dura-Ace 9300 groupset is presented there as “pretty much common knowledge”. The British outlet recalls that it has been spotted at the Vuelta a España and that the previous week it reported leaked photos of the new shifters, rear derailleur and power meter; these pedals would be, it writes, “the latest confirmation”..
Road.cc reports that it received from a reader, Martijn Veluwenkamp, screenshots of a since-deleted Instagram post published by Dutch bike shop Handmade Weesp. They appear to show pedals labelled Dura-Ace PD-R9300 — the generation that would succeed the current R9100 — along with a caption announcing a stack height down to 12.5 mm.
One caveat is required, and road.cc takes it itself: that figure comes from an Instagram caption read through machine translation. The British outlet also writes that the pedals and cleats in the photos “certainly look very much like SPD-SL”, then asks whether they are identical and answers immediately: “Not quite”..
Square cleats, and the compatibility question
Road.cc dwells at length on the shape of the cleats. According to the outlet, those in the photos “appear to be square”, which suggests there would be little or no room to fine-tune their position. It recalls that with SPD-SL, the holes in the cleats are rectangular, precisely so that they can be moved forwards or backwards on the sole.
From there, road.cc asks the question that will decide how much this leak matters: is SPD-SLR simply an update of SPD-SL, perhaps a lighter version, or an entirely new and possibly incompatible system? The outlet offers a clue, drawn from Paris-Roubaix: at this year’s edition, Mathieu van der Poel, on SPD-SL, could not clip in when trying to swap bikes with Jasper Philipsen, who was riding prototype cleats and pedals.
Why stack height has become a selling point
Stack height — the distance between the pedal axle and the top of the cleat — has gone in a few seasons from an engineering detail to a marketing argument. Road.cc recalls that Q36.5 and SRM launched a pedal-and-shoe package last year announced at 9.7 mm, claiming “the most direct and efficient power transfer on the market”.
At 12.5 mm, the leaked pedals would remain above that figure, but would gain a little over two millimetres on the R9100. None of this is confirmed, however: as of road.cc’s publication date, Shimano had announced nothing and confirmed nothing officially, and the whole thing rests on a deleted post.
