GIANT VS GIANT
We go in search of the joules in Giant’s crown, pitting a delectable carbon racer with electronic shifting against a road bike with a motor – can the two ever be friends?
Giant’s Road-E+1 is a drop-barred specimen that makes the e-bike market sexy. Can it coexist with a carbon racer? We hit the hills with another Giant, the pedal-powered TCR Advanced Pro Disc to find out.
If you have three or four grand burning a hole in your pocket, you might be thinking about your next bike. The obvious solution and the one that we would usually endorse is an all-singing, all-dancing carbon racer, perhaps with electronic gears. Something like the Giant TCR Advanced Pro Disc, perhaps. This racy machine is 7.8kg of gloriously stiff, svelte carbon. It’s kitted out with Shimano’s Ultegra Di2 components and groupset-equivalent hydraulic disc brakes, and rolls on carbon clinchers. It is, in short, completely cutting edge and one of those bikes that defies upgrades because there’s really nothing worth changing.
What if you want something a bit different? What if you feel like cheating a little bit? Ladies and gentleman, we give you the Giant Road-E+1.
The Road-E+1 is that rare beast – an e-bike that’s also a proper road bike with a drop bar and sporty geometry. It marries an all-aluminium frameset that’s been designed from the ground up as an e-bike to a Yamaha motor and a battery pack, which is integrated into the down-tube.
I detailed my experience riding the Road-E+1 at its launch last year in Austria (see issue 319’s Power supplement), where the Kitzbüheler Horn climb proved almost too much for this mechanically doped machine. The thing might have overheated – Giant has subsequently told us that such abuse falls outside normal operating conditions, ergo, it wasn’t its fault – but I came away deeply impressed with the entertainment value of electrified road bikes, and their ability to offer extraordinary riding experiences to cyclists who wouldn’t contemplate tackling big distances or mountains on an ordinary bike.
The burning question for us now is whether e-bikes can ever coexist with normal ones. To find out I recruited art editor Rob to ride the Road-E+1, with me on the unassisted TCR. Rob is a moderately experienced cyclist who’s let himself go a bit; I’m a formerly serious cyclist who cheats by being abnormally thin. We are a match made, if not in heaven, then perhaps on one of the less well designed dating apps.
The damunited
The stage for our little performance is the
The stage for our little performance is the roads that encircle Llyn Brianne reservoir
roads that encircle Llyn Brianne reservoir in Carmarthenshire, south west Wales. The scenery is that of Switzerland slightly shrunken; a huge James Bond film-esque dam holds the water back, and our ride begins by crossing it.
The dam is closed to regular car traffic but there’s nothing to stop you walking or riding over it. Once across, we bid farewell to tarmac for a while, zipping along a forestry road that’s mostly packed dirt with a sprinkling of gravel. Immediately I wonder if I’ve made a grave error. For all its qualities – light weight, stiffness, braking ability – the TCR is a race bike and with the best will in the world, it’s quite a firm-riding thing on an unkempt surface.
There is one saving grace; although they measure just 25mm across, the TCR’s tyres and rims are designed for tubeless, and the bike arrived at Cycling Plus HQ sans-inners, with sealant sloshing around the rim. That means I don’t have to run silly pressures as I rattle through the woods, and it gives me hope that my tyres will remain unpunctured. They do.
On the Road-E+1, Rob is immediately sold on the concept of having to do very little work. It rapidly becomes apparent that on even the slightest uphill he can leave me in his dust, and he does so, repeatedly. On 32mm rubber he’s comfortable and more confident in the corners.
The off-road excursion is punctuated by