Swift Hypervox

Swift gets aerodynamic, but is the result distinct enough to be worth it?

Ican’t be sure, but I think Swift’s founder, Mark Blewett, was Cyclist’s first ever visitor way back in 2012 when we launched this magazine. I made tea as we’d yet to unpack the coffee machine, and he showed us his debut UK road frame, the Ultravox RS-1.

At that time new brands peddling carbon wares seemed ten-a-penny, but Swift sounded different. It’s no secret that the majority of the world’s mass-produced carbon bikes come from a relative handful of Chinese factories, but perhaps less understood is the variance in quality across those factories, and the changeability of workforce – often when a production run finishes, workers who have become skilled in making a particular type of frame are let go and reabsorbed into the pool, taking their skills and knowledge with them.

In broad strokes, the big brands with the big order numbers get the best factories and retain the workers. Smaller brands can struggle. So Blewett, an ex-pro and clearly a dedicated man, came up with a novel approach.

‘You have to earn your place on the factory floor,’ he told me. ‘Part of that’s big orders, so if you’re Trek or Specialized it’s not a problem, but the other part is what the Chinese call guanxi, the mutual trust in business. To get the consistent quality I was looking for with the relatively low volumes I wanted, I had to form that relationship with the factories. So I moved there.’

‘There’ was Xiamen, China, and while it’s impossible to know how Swift’s bikes would have turned out otherwise, I can vouch for the Ultravox RS-1 and its tweaked Ti (Team issue) big brother as being exceptional bikes, so I was excited to see what the Hypervox was made of.

Reap the wild wind

According to Swift’s marketing manager, Neil Gardiner, the Hypervox is a reluctant response to the sprinters on last year’s Swift-sponsored team, Drapac.

‘They had the Ultravox and were initially happy, but they kept on asking for an aero bike,’ he says.