Indholdsfortegnelse for April 2018 i Bicycling

THE SYNAPSE HAS BEEN a Cannondale stalwart since 2006, a race-ready endurance bike proven in the grueling European Spring Classics. The all-new 2018 frames are disc-brake only with clearance for up to 32mm tires. They retain the line’s thin 25.4mm seatpost and spindly seatstays (both tuned for comfort), and are engineered for consistent handling across the size run. The frames are slightly asymmetrical at the fork and rear triangle, a design that the company says improves stiffness and offsets discbraking forces. At a time when some companies have gone with active suspension (actual shocks in the front or rear) on endurance bikes, Cannondale has opted to improve flex by fine-tuning the frame’s carbon construction and tube shaping. The Synapse’s endurancerace geometry (a slightly taller head tube and shorter top tube…

The fork! The RockShox Reba RL 29 is a solid, tunable fork that’s lighter than many other models on bikes at this price point. It has a quality damper for better performance over a range of terrains and temperatures, and comes with a women’s tune to optimize it for lighter riders. The frame! Light, stiff aluminum construction helps all the power you put in translate into forward motion, and the trail-friendly geometry of this hardtail (a little slacker and more relaxed) means that you can tackle techy trails with confidence. This year, Specialized is taking a new approach to its women’s models: The frame is unisex, with women’s touchpoints—and fun acid pink paint. The wheels! Roval wheels come outfitted with Specialized Fast Trak tires (rims and tires are both tubelessready…

IN ONE OF MY FAVORITE Kurt Vonnegut quotes, he tells his wife he’s going to go buy an envelope: Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope. On his little outing, Vonnegut sees things and meets people. He gives a fire truck the thumbs-up and asks a woman about her dog. That joy—of turning a simple errand into an excuse to connect to the world—is what I experienced riding the Felt Tote’m e-cargo bike. I picked my way…

THE RADAR CAFÉ IS PART of Breezer’s Adventure Café series, meaning it shares the same frame as its Radar drop-bar gravel/bikepacking model but is fitted with a flat bar to make it more appropriate for casual city riding. Its sturdy steel frame and 29-inch wheels support massive 1.9-inch tires, which soak up hits from trolley tracks to potholes, and plow through urban debris. A 680mmwide, backswept handlebar contributes to a comfortable, upright position and a feeling of easy control, even for less experienced riders. The 1x10 gearing keeps shifting simple, and the wide-range 11-42 cassette provides more gears than usual for a town bike—I was able to ride around a hilly suburb without using the three easiest gears. The Radar Café’s impressive capability may have been part of the reason…

IN 2014, I said in a review of the then-new Haanjo Comp that “it isn’t built for a singular purpose, but it is remarkably capable at a lot of different kinds of ride experiences.” Four years later, I wanted to check out that assertion. Had the bike changed? Had my perceptions? Or did it still ring true? Call the current edition a 2017.5 model year. Diamondback revamped much of the Haanjo line for 2018, but not the aluminum Comp; this holdover might be our favorite in the lineup and makes improvements over the previous version (see chart). The 2014 version was a little confused, geometry-wise, with a cyclocross-ish lower stack and gravel-ish long wheelbase. It also had a (mostly) hardworking parts kit straining to fit inside its price range. Now,…

THE HARDEST PART ABOUT testing bikes is breaking up with them when the test period is over, long after they’ve become an integral part of my life and I’ve imagined an entire future for us together. And with the Niner RLT 9, I really felt like we had something special. We tooled around gravel roads with no particular destination in mind. We took a three-day bikepacking trip to the Pisgah National Forest near Asheville, North Carolina—one last big adventure before impending parenthood encroaches on my weekend freedom. We even spent our first major holiday together, as I loaded up the bike with frame packs full of leftovers and rode 60 miles home from my family’s Thanksgiving celebration. And then our time together drew to a close, and I had to…

1 The color. Celeste never gets old (clearly—Bianchi’s used it since the early 1900s). 2 Seeing 35mm-wide knobby tires on a Bianchi. Closely related to the Impulso, Bianchi’s premium alloy endurance bike, the All Road gets more adventurous with extra clearance for those big tires (up t0 40mm), slightly lengthened stays, and a more relaxed set of angles. 3 Speaking of the tires.... The Kenda Flintridges blend a smooth rolling center section with aggressive side knobs for fast pace on smooth terrain and excellent grip offpiste. I could ride them in the low 40s psi for exceptional comfort, with little squirm and supreme traction. One ding, though—this version of the Flintridge (not the same as the one on page 74) isn’t tubeless-compatible, though the rims are. 4 The ride lives…

“VERSATILE” DOES NOT jump to mind when you think about aero bikes. Fast? Sure. Purpose-built? That, too. Finicky? Sometimes, with convoluted cable routing and tight tire clearances. But given its charms, and the fact that the rim-brake version of Scott’s Foil won the 2016 Paris-Roubaix—a brutal race that stiff-riding aero machines are not generally suited to—you can plausibly argue it’s the most versatile of the current crop of bikes in its class. Scott’s Foil series uses a truncated airfoil-tube shape, sometimes called a Kamm tail, that’s popular among bikemakers because it offers many of the advantages of aerodynamic frame designs with a better ride than conventional airfoil shapes. The Foil Disc is as stiff as non-aero race bikes and, once up to speed, seems to hold that momentum with less…

THE MASI CXRC WALKS THE LINE BETWEEN CYCLOCROSS RACING AND GRAVEL RIDING. HERE’S HOW ITS SMART PARTS AND GEOMETRY WORK FOR EACH DISCIPLINE. Gravel GEARS FOR DAYS A Shimano 105 drivetrain paired to a Praxis Works double crankset (46/36) provides a wide range to tackle varied terrain. RACK AND FENDER MOUNTS Keep mud off your back (and off your friends’ faces) and haul gear with ease on your next bikepacking trip. FITS 650B WHEELS With smaller wheels, the bike accommodates fatter, highervolume tires for better traction and comfort. Both BIG CLEARANCE Run up to 700x40mm or 650bx42mm tires. All that clearance also keeps your wheels spinning in muddy ’cross races. SMOOTH RIDE The carbon frame and fork are a solid platform for sprinting but still soften the sting of rutted…

ENDURANCE BIKES ARE stable. Endurance bikes are comfortable. Endurance bikes are compliant. And even though I fancy myself an endurance rider, I often take my race-oriented bike to endurance-oriented events— because endurance bikes can also be a bit dull and slow, which, ironically, can make long, hard rides feel even longer and harder. Cervélo, in unveiling its C-series, shows supreme understanding of the modern road enthusiast’s needs, delivering a bike with a lively race pedigree that neither bucks nor bores, but rather serves up a hard-charging, smooth-sailing ride over every surface. That special blend of spunk and stability is apparent the moment you hit the road. The C3 has a low center of gravity and elongated wheelbase, courtesy of a relaxed geometry, a tall (but not too tall) head tube,…

Now in carbon! The most recent Process model, called G2 (second generation), keeps everything everyone loved about the firstgeneration 153 (G1), but has been redesigned from the ground up around a carbon frame, shown here. The rest of the line is aluminum. Accommodates longer droppers. More standover and a short seat tube with a slightly steeper angle mean you can fit a longer dropper post (150mm on a size medium) on the frame and still achieve the right seat height. Still a crowd pleaser. Devoted fans of the Process 153 love it for its low standover, progressive geometry, nimble ride, and ability to rip gnarly descents— none of this has changed in the G2. Trail-ready rubber. Maxxis Minion DHF tires (2.5-inch, front; 2.3-inch, rear) are mounted on 29mm-wide, 27.5-inch WTB…

LOOKING FOR YOUR FIRST mountain bike? This could be it. The Dragonslayer, a steel hardtail with a 120mm fork and 27.5+ tires, is so dialed, your learning curve will be more intuitive than intimidating. The extra volume in the 3-inch-wide Vittoria Cannolis tires means you can run lower pressure, increasing traction and stability through loose corners and over roots and rocks. The added width also lets you roll over slots in the trail that might stall a narrower tire. Having no rear suspension saves on costs, so you get a good fork (a RockShox Recon RL) and a Shimano SLX 1x drivetrain with a massive 46-tooth cog that helps you get up punchy climbs. The Dragonslayer is versatile, too. Sliding dropouts let you convert it to a singlespeed, and rear-rack…

1 Huck into a rocky chute at breakneck speed. The Instinct’s 140mm suspension feels lively and smooth, soaking up big and small impacts without hesitation. It tackles the most aggressive root- and rockstrewn trails with finesse, floats almost effortlessly off ledges, and stays glued to the ground through rock gardens. 2 Rage buff singletrack with friends. The Instinct can also hang on faster and flowier trails without feeling like too much bike. It’s nimble and easy to maneuver on technical uphills, and snaps through turns. Increasing its versatility, the angles of the bike can be changed in up to nine different ways with Rocky’s RIDE-9 adjustable geometry, allowing you to fine-tune the head-tube angle (by up to a total of 1 degree) and bottom bracket height with only a set…

CERTAIN BIKES SPEAK TO you. The Eddy Merckx Liege 75 screamed at me. Even though Merckx’s feats were way before my time—I was only three in 1975 when he won his fifth Liège-Bastogne-Liège, the race this bike was named after— I know enough about history that the Molteni orange paint stirred something inside me. Throw in the Campagnolo Potenza drivetrain and Deda Zero components and you have a pretty unique bike. I’ve ridden a number of finely tuned custom and semicustom steel frames from boutique builders, so my bar is high. I worried that what seemed so exciting on paper wouldn’t live up to my expectations on the road. That definitely wasn’t the case. The Liege impressed me with its combination of smoothness and sporty, agile handling that made it…

THIS IS NOT A GRAVEL BIKE, let’s get that straight. (At a staggering $8,450 for the frameset, taking this bike on gravel would be like rallying a Ferrari in Paris- Dakar.) This is the successor to Pinarello’s K8-S Classics race bike, and a likely choice for Team Sky in this year’s events. An integral part of its race-focused speed and efficiency is its electronic suspension. Wait, what? That’s right: The DSS rear suspension that Pinarello first put on the K8-S in 2115 now has automatic electronic control. Called eDSS, the guts of the system are similar: an elastomer spring that, along with flexing chainstays, provides 11mm of travel. A small piggyback reservoir contains an electronically controlled hydraulic damper, which is connected to gyroscopes and accelerometers located in the seat tube…

READ ALMOST ANY OF MY mountain bike reviews over the last few years and you’ll see a strong preference for 29er wheels on most bikes with less than 160mm of travel. However, every now and then a 27.5-inch model comes along and reminds me how fun and flickable that size can be—like the 140mm-travel Devinci Troy. About halfway into the first ride I quit thinking about the details and just enjoyed what turned out to be one of my favorite trail bikes regardless of wheel size. Launched last year, this bike was a tad ahead of its time. It’s sure-footed even on the rough and steep trails that many would consider enduro-bike territory. That’s because, compared with the original Troy, Devinci gave this second-generation model a beefier carbon frame and…

CONSIDER, IF YOU WILL, THE plight of the modern mountain biker, possessed of a machine with enormous functionality. With today’s bikes you can toggle between multiple suspension settings on the fly, you can raise or lower your seat with the flick of a lever, you can shift precisely across 11 or 12 gears with a single trigger, and you can activate impressive braking power with just a finger. Awesome, yes—but a lot to keep track of. Approaching a techy descent, for instance, do you switch suspension settings or drop your post? You might not have time for both. That’s the problem BMC’s Trailsync system solves. One remote lever controls both rear suspension and dropper post. When the post is at full mast, the shock is set to firmer pedal support.…

THIS STEEL ROAD BIKE IS SO CAPABLE, YOU CAN HIT EVERY SURFACE IN A SINGLE RIDE. DON’T BELIEVE IT? I RACKED UP ALL THIS IN ONE DAY: 1 FOUR STRETCHES OF GRAVEL ROAD A new, lighter, custombutted steel frame, 40mm Clement X’Plor MSO tires, a Whisky No. 9 carbon fork, plus a longer wheelbase and relaxed steering geometry gave me more stability and control through loose gravel. (The bike can also clear 650bx47mm tires, so on other occasions, I subbed them in for the rowdiest dirt rides.) 2 ONE SECTION OF SINGLETRACK Thanks to the 12-degree flared drops that effectively widen the Salsa Cowbell handlebar, I had some extra leverage over the front end to navigate bumpy terrain, including a few tame singletrack trails. 3 TWO TOWN-SIGN SPRINTS The Cosmic…

THIS IS NOT THE FIRST TIME Benno founder and owner Benno Baezinger has brought joy into my life. In 2004, he and his then-partner and cofounder at Electra Bicycle Company visited BICYCLING with a fleet of stylish, innovative cruiser bikes. I couldn’t take my eyes off the three-speed Revil—a red chopper with orange flames and an ape-hanger handlebar. I’d never seen a bike quite like it. But those cool cruisers were more than just a novelty. They were a huge leap toward a lofty goal: “to get more people on bikes,” says Benno. To do that, Electra used two ingredients: comfort and style. “It always bothered me, though, that our bikes couldn’t do more,” he said. Fast-forward to today. E-bikes have become a top choice for two-wheeled urban mobility, promising…

NON-BIKE BUYS THAT UPGRADED OUR RIDE // Epsom salts // Sunscreen // Espresso maker // Handlebar camera bag // Portable speaker // Pull-up bar // Collapsible nylon backpack // YogaGlo subscription // Wine caddy How to Find Love at First Ride Pick a bike that feels good for your body. “The first time I bought a bike that fit, I discovered your shoulders aren’t supposed to be in pain the whole time you’re riding, and my quality of life felt like it tripled immediately,” says associate digital editor Caitlin Giddings. Or has a paint job that makes your knees weak. “My Fat Chance Yo Betty was an amazing metallic chameleon green. And it had a cool name,” says contributing writer Selene Yeager. Assemble a Frankenbike. “When I was 16, I ordered…