£1000 Bike of the Year
We go in search of our £1000 Bike of the Year
Athousand pounds is the smallest large amount of money there is, a psychological Rubicon some daren’t cross for a mere pushbike. It’s roughly the amount of money many of us spend on our first serious bike, it’s the cutoff for most cycle-to-work schemes, and it’s just enough cash to buy something genuinely excellent.
We don’t have space to include every £1000 bike available in the UK, so here are 10 of the best, from our larger test pool of 15, that cover a range of specs and features. Nine bikes are alloy, one is carbon. Five sport Shimano’s new 10-speed Tiagra groupset, while four have 11-speed 105 and, thanks to some inadvertent cheating on the budget front, one is built with the outstanding Ultegra. Three have disc brakes, ranging from the most basic mechanical callipers on the Cannondale Optimo through to the mechanical hydraulic hybrids of the Giant Contend.
While the choice of bikes available is rich and varied, it’s not as much as it was before the pound tanked last year. This happened at a time when bike manufacturers were setting prices, and a number hedged their bets with substantial rises.
While value for money is important, we’re also interested in ride quality and practicality. The latest affordable bikes inherit much of the clever frame technology of their more expensive brethren, the design tweaks that target stiffness and compliance where it’s needed most. Similarly, cheaper groupsets borrow from their blingier siblings, and at this price the spec substitutions can make or break a bike. It comes down to which bike we would buy with our own money.