KINESIS 4S DISC £1850
› Road version of Kinesis’s disc-braked all-rounder
Got a bad case of the biking blues and want to feel in the pink? Well, the Kinesis 4s Disc might just be the bike to bring the colour back to your cheeks. It’s pink, very pink... pinker even than the picture suggests. Oh, and it’s also available in a more sober blue if you want to keep a low profile.
This Kinesis is very much a product of our versatility-loving times as the 4S Disc is available in both gravel and road versions, each of which costs £1850 – £750 for the frameset and £1100 for the Apex 1 Hydraulic Build Kit. We plumped for the road build without the flared bar and with
narrower tyres and we had no cause to complain – the 4S Disc was a real treat. While the road bike tyres may nominally be a modest 27mm, they actually pumped up to 30+mm and were fine on hard-packed gravel.
Kinesis calls its new 4s Disc frame ‘the natural evolution of our very first winter training frames’. It argues that by concentrating on aluminium it has ‘created a frame that rivals carbon in many ways, and hands down beats it on price’. It keeps weight down by using ‘Super Plastic Forming’ – the only UK company to do so – allowing it to use lighter tubes that can be formed into more intricate shapes than hydroforming.
The geometry successfully straddles the road/gravel bike divide. The frame angles are reasonably steep, the head-tube isn’t that tall and the wheelbase is only a tad over a metre. All this means you can romp along nicely at a very decent lick. But there’s loads of year-round commuting, training, touring and bike-packing practicality factored into the build. There are fittings and bags of clearance for Kinesis’s own Fend-Off mudguards, and rear rack mounts, too.
The SRAM Apex 1x groupset has the same appealing gear range as the much less expensive Fuji, but the extra money isn’t wasted. The 4S Disc
has SRAM’s hydraulic disc brakes with 160mm rotors and stopping is about as near to perfect as it could be – powerful, controlled and with a very light action. If you’ve only ever used rim brakes, this sort of braking will put paid to any argument. It’s better. End of. Saying otherwise is fake news.
The wheels and tyres proved a good combination. The wide Alex rims are tubeless ready and can seat tyres up to 40mm wide or more. Frame and fork have 12mm thru-axles with GW’S patented Switch Levers for very neat removal and installation. The lever has a 5mm hex head that fits into the thru-axle; tighten to 10Nm and that’s it. To remove the thru-axle you just undo it. It’s easy to swap between wheels and should you lose it, it’s cheap to replace – in the meantime, just carry a hex key.
But none of these things show how much fun the Kinesis is. When we were younger, more than likely we had one bike we’d use for our paper round, racing our mates, riding to school, romping through the woods after lessons, posing on to impress our mates. This does all of those. Well, if pink’s your thing it does…
You’ll lose a slight amount of speed on the road – though not much as the Challenge Paris-Roubaix tyres are excellent – but that’s more than made up for, even in this ‘road’ build, by their ability to hit rougher stuff. With different, wider tyres you could hit much more gnarly stuff. Commuter? Yep. Trainer? Yep. Fitness and fun riding? Defo. Bikepacking and touring? Thumbs up.