12/11/2023 0 Comments Endurance bike vs gravel bikeThese were all drop bar bikes (road bar bikes), but even then the divergence continued with handlebars. The one lasso that you could throw over all of this was the handlebar. You could get road bar suspension, disc brakes, aero versus road versus endurance, road versus gravel, the iterations were legion. Other companies followed suit and all of a sudden you could get any kind of road bike, in any geometric style, you wanted. It found it needed another geometry, and then another (geometries it called H1, H2, and H3). Trek, as an example, offered one dominant carbon road geometry 20 years ago. For 20 years, until year before last, there was a divergence among drop bar bike motifs. Katherine Moore took charge of the women’s category, pitting these leading bikes head-to-head to find the best of the bunch.There’s been a reversal of polarity in road bike design. Simon von BromleyĪs our nerd-in-chief, BikeRadar’s senior technical writer, Simon von Bromley, was tasked with heading up the performance category. With more than a decade of Bike of the Year experience behind him, BikeRadar’s senior technical editor, Warren Rossiter, headed up the endurance category. The result, however, is the most comprehensive bike test out there, and one that spans almost every type of drop-bar bike on the market, with prices ranging from £650 to north of five figures. And, of course, there’s a limit as to the number of bikes we can test. Some newly launched bikes may also have arrived outside of the testing window to be included or allow for comparative testing. If there’s a bike you think we should have included, chances are we tried. We put out more than 100 bike requests for this year’s road and gravel test, before whittling down our final selection of 23 bikes. With thousands of miles in the saddle, and tens of thousands of words in our reviews, our team puts in the hard yards through winter and early spring.īike and component shortages have been well publicised and affect the industry from top to bottom, from brands waiting on a single small part to launch a new bike through to the test bikes available to media and, of course, the scramble to buy chains, brake pads and just about every other consumable part. Liv Langma Advanced Disc 1+ (category winner)īike of the Year is our biggest test of the year, covering 23 road and gravel bikes, and 24 mountain bikes.We stuck with women’s-specific bikes for the purposes of this test, but it’s worth reiterating that female riders are, of course, not limited to just these models. Somewhere in the middle, a number of brands offer a number of women’s-specific builds, using a unisex frame built up with women’s saddles and proportionally sized handlebars, including Cube and, under the Contessa label, Scott. These are built based on women’s fit data from the frame up. Liv is a notable outlier and has continued to offer truly women’s-specific bikes. Instead, major bike brands including Specialized and Trek – which formerly offered women’s-specific bikes – have opted to offer an improved range of unisex bikes, acknowledging that there needs to be a greater range of sizes and fits for all genders. Russel Burton / Our Mediaĭespite the huge growth in women’s cycling over recent years, the number of women’s-specific road bikes on offer has actually decreased. We stuck with women’s-specific bikes for this year’s test. Cannondale Synapse Carbon LTD RLE (category winner).The advent of road disc brakes has allowed endurance bikes to flourish as truly versatile machines that bridge the gap between road and gravel, and that’s reflected in this year’s Bike of the Year contenders. With that in mind, this year we’ve focused our efforts on a single ‘performance’ category. Over the past few years, we’ve seen the convergence of aerodynamics and low weight in top-tier race bikes. Let’s take a closer look at the contenders. Some are the latest versions of familiar names, with the likes of the Trek Domane, BMC Roadmachine and Cannondale Synapse all present and correct, while others are brand-new bikes for 2022. The bikes on test range from £650 to north of £10,000, so there is something for everyone, regardless of your riding style or budget. We’ve focused the 2022 test on five categories, with a wide variety of performance, endurance, gravel, budget and women’s bikes put through their paces by our Bike of the Year team. Russel Burton / Immediate Mediaĭespite all that’s going on in the world politically and pandemically – and the knock-on impact that’s having on the bike industry – the standard of bikes being designed, created and mass-produced is incredibly high in terms of usability, performance and innovation. Testing took place across five road and gravel bike categories.
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