£1000 CARBON OR ALUMINIUM
WHICH IS BEST
So, you have £1000 of your hard-earned tucked in your cycling jersey. Or maybe you’re prepared to hit your credit card for a grand to buy your first serious road bike. Or you’re upgrading from a more basic, budget bike. Whatever, the choice is the same: carbon fibre or aluminium, supposedly mundane metal or high-tech composite? Your beating heart will probably say carbon but should you be listening to your coronary organ when your brain might say something else? The best way we could think of to answer the burning question of the age was to take two near-as-dammit identical bikes – one made from carbon, the other aluminium – and ride them head-to-head and back-to-back.
This is where Boardman Bikes comes in. Its SLR 8.9c and its Boardman Team Carbon predecessors have been the first carbon road bike for a whole generation of cyclists. The 8.9c is widely available on the high street through Halfords, Cycle Republic as well as online, and Boardman has managed to keep the cost down to £1000 for a decade, which is one hell of an achievement with ever-growing costs and a falling pound.
Boardman’s Carbon used to have competition from the Calibre Nibiru, but Go Outdoors (the retail chain behind the Calibre) is now concentrating on aluminium, though we hear a new budget carbon Calibre may be on the cards. Now Boardman’s main
competition at a grand for carbon comes from Ribble’s recently revamped and similarly specced R872 and the Vitus Zenium, though fellow online retailer Merlin sometimes has carbon discounted to £1000. Even Germany’s internet-only bargain-meisters Canyon and Rose can’t put out a carbon bike at this price.
The Boardman SLR 8.9c is a lovely ride and one of our top five bikes of the year in the £1000 price range.
NEW BIKE ON THE BLOCK
But this isn’t the only Boardman at this price. It’s not even the only SLR 8.9 – as there’s also the SLR 8.9a (‘a’ for aluminium, ‘c’ for carbon). They share near identical endurance geometry – Boardman Bikes has long been a pioneer of less racy road bikes – but the aluminium model gets an upgrade from the 10-speed Shimano Tiagra to 11-speed 105 and it’s a little lighter, too. This is actually true of most entry-level carbon bikes: they will nearly always be slightly heavier than the same company’s aluminium challengers.
One of the few criticisms that we had of the carbon SLR 8.9 is also true of the aluminium 8.9a – the slightly limited gear range on a bike that’s going to be aimed at the commuter, recreational and fitness rider. These days, 10- and 11-speed bikes commonly come with 11-32 or even 11-34 cassettes, giving you hill-friendly lower gears, so the 11-28, while giving nice small jumps does leave you working harder on steeper climbs. You’d actually have to swap the rear mech, too, from the
short cage version fitted, if you wanted lower, widerspread gears. That’s a bit of a shame if you live in a very hilly area – as we do – and like to spin up the hills. Both have neat mudguard fittings, with the rear bosses on the inside of the seatstays particularly tidy, but the lack of rack mounts on both is also slightly surprising, as they’re cheap to manufacture and add practicality. True, there are aftermarket solutions and seatpost-mounted rack options, but we’d have appreciated them as standard. Both the Boardmans have similar brakes, too, in the form of deep-drop Tektro callipers – the extra length of the callipers allows them to be used on bikes with mudguards, and the ability to fit ’guards is a massive plus for a bike likely to get year-round use. That said, their stopping power isn’t quite on a par with Shimano 105 rim brakes. In an ideal world we’d like Shimano deep-drop stoppers but their newest groupsets don’t include them. The frame geometry and the clearance these brakes allow also mean that there’s room for 28mm tyres, which are becoming ever more popular. They’re perhaps marginally slower but they will up your comfort.
KING CARBON?
The SLR 8.9c has a light-feeling, lively handling ride but one that’s not too twitchy for commuting or everyday riding. The carbon has more-than-adequate comfort for long-distance riding too, and we got in loads of miles on this over the winter and spring with ne’er a murmur of discomfort.
Some of this will be down to the changes from the original Boardman Carbon Team. The first 2009 models had a near-horizontal top-tube and the thenpopular 31.6mm seatpost, which it stayed with up until the birth of the 8.9c. Now it’s a more compact frame with up-to-date aero-friendly features and a narrower 27.2mm seatpost. The result is a seatpost that o!ers a bit more fore-andaft deflection for extra comfort. The small rear triangle that results from dropping the seatstays also makes the rear end sti!er, for theoretically more e"cient pedalling. The saddle’s pretty decent, too: manufactured by the saddle expert Velo especially for Boardman, its shape strongly echoes that of the Fizik Antares, which funnily enough is the saddle on the aluminium Boardman.
The geometry bridges the gap between performance and race, making it ideal for fast riding without putting you in an extreme riding position. It’s fine for tackling personal bests, and its predecessor propelled Nicole Cooke to gold at the
2008 Beijing Olympics, so it’s not too shabby when it comes to speed!
ALLY P ALLY?
The Boardman 8.9 alloy shares the same geometry, albeit with slightly di erent tube profiles, so it’s no surprise to find, well, a very similar ride. The 100g weight di erence – we’ve said this before – is undetectable on and o the bike, and with like-forlike frame angles there’s diddly-squat detectable di erence in speed and performance too. And any minor di erences in the tube profiles didn’t appear to be significant in the weeks we spent testing, with wind strength and rider fitness having more e ect on both commuting and climbing times. Spend hours in Boardman’s wind tunnel and you may split the two bikes’ aerodynamic prowess, because hard-riding miles in the real world couldn’t separate them.
The Specialized Allez Elite is one of the marketleading bikes at this price and, using this as a benchmark, we find the Boardmans are similar: frame angles around 73 degrees, slightly stretched 415mm chainstays but the Boardmans have a slightly taller head-tube in this size. Look at the Allez and the SLRs and their profiles are strikingly alike. The sloping flattened top-tube, larger diameter down-tube and severely dropped seatstays are all from 2019’s bikebuilding 101, as is the tapered carbon steerer that helps with precise handling on both bikes.
In addition to the groupset, two areas where the metal model gains over the carbon one are the tyres and saddle. The 8.9a gets the higher-spec Rubino Pro tyres rather than the basic Rubino, and it’s the highly regarded Fizik Antares all-rounder, rather than the carbon bike’s Antares-alike saddle. Both are worthwhile upgrades as these are two areas that bike companies like to economise on to hit the £1000 price point. But could we detect any major di erences? No!
SMOO T H OPER AT ORS
The ride of the carbon SLR 8.9 belies its budget price, and then some. It’s smooth and composed, the carbon easily softening road bumps and taking the edge o chatter. The 25mm tyres are okay, and on the carbon model the rims are tubeless-ready, which we reckon is a real boon. Go up to the rims’ maximum 28mm tyre width and switch to tubeless and you’ll increase the comfort even further.
The aluminium 8.9? Just as smooth, equally as composed, sharp-handling and not at all uncomfortable. The smooth-welded triple-butted frame doesn’t take the edge o very poor surfaces quite as well as the carbon bike but the di erences
aren’t huge. We put in a few hundred miles on this one as well, on 16.5-mile commutes and more challenging rides and could easily live with it for longer. Yes, 105 is that much ‘nicer’ than Tiagra and arguably the alloy model looks better than the carbon bike’s twotone grey but there’s little discernible performance di!erence between the wheels – or the bikes’ two contact points. The all-carbon fork’s the same on both, as are the bars, Velo tape and even the headset. Throw in the 103g weight di!erence and the two bikes have more in common than di!erentiates them.
A CLOSE CALL
We asked a question that is perhaps unanswerable. It would have been much easier to ask whether the 8.9 carbon is one of the best bikes at its price – and the answer’s a definite ‘yes’. It’s remarkable how Boardman has kept the price down and with no obvious diminution in ride quality.
But this is just one area in which the 8.9c scores heavily. Boardman has also moved with the times and the SLR 8.9c is very much a bike of our era – the frame was developed with the help of CFD (computational fluid dynamics) so, while not an aero bike, the truncated aerofoil tube profiles will have drag-reducing properties.
It’s su"ciently sti! for those of us this side of Messrs Hoy and Cavendish, with a little flex during full-on sprints and hard, out-of-the-saddle climbing, and the wheels aren’t super-sti! either. But that’s more than made up for by its day-long endurance-friendly geometry and the comfort that imbues.
All of that is equally true of the aluminium interloper. Aluminium harsh and uncomfortable? Not for a decade or two. And with wider tyres than years ago, dropped seatstays and a quality saddle, you could easily believe that you’re riding on carbon.
BALANCING THE SCALES
The two bikes similarities shouldn’t be that surprising. Weight is much less crucial for a bike’s performance than aerodynamics and with the carbon frame having the same aerodynamic features as Boardman’s toplevel SLR9.8 this is a flyer, with the carbon also taking the sting out of rougher road surfaces. Both have the same award-winning geometry, too.
But Boardman’s SLR 8.9c is in a class of its own – that of the £1000 carbon road bike. At a push, that’s where we’d put our money. The comfort of carbon gives it that dash of smoothness and cachet, and you barely notice the drop down to 10-speed Tiagra. Its tubeless-ready rims add to your ability to upgrade it, too. We’d have appreciated a lower bottom gear and brakes on both but those are about our only quibbles.
The problem with the SLR8.9a is that, while a very fine bike in its own right, it’s up against sti! opposition – not just from its carbon sibling but aluminium road bikes from the likes of Giant and Specialized on the high street and Canyon and Rose online.