The Luna Pro offers one of the most planted rides I’ve ever come across
Cast an eye over the Calfee range and you’ll notice a recurring theme – a kind of webbing between the tube junctions. Outwardly it appears mainly aesthetic, but there’s functional method behind the appearance. In Calfee’s early carbon days the webbing was a necessary upshot of the seam created during the moulding process where tubes were mitred and wrapped.
Calfee still uses this technique in the Tetra frame – the evolution of Lemond’s first bike and the longestrunning carbon fibre frameset on the market – but over the years the webs have evolved into what Calfee refers to as gussets, and are designed to strengthen the joins and add rigidity to the frame. The Luna construction might look similar, if chunkier, but in fact it’s born of tube and lug, where roll-wrapped tubes are bonded into Calfeemade carbon lugs. (As an aside, roll-wrapped tubes are made from carbon fibre sheets wrapped and cured around a cylindrical mandrel, unlike filament-wound tubes, where fibres are wound around a mandrel like cotton round a bobbin.) On the Luna Pro, the tubes have been beefed up to 44mm in the head and down tube to increase stiffness over the skinnier-tubed regular Luna.
The result is an interesting bag. On paper the frame is relatively heavy at 1.3kg (size 56cm), but in practice whether it’s the extra grams or extra reinforcement from the gussets, or indeed some other hidden masterstroke in materials or construction, the Luna has the most exceptional ride quality, and here’s why…
Strong and stable
The Luna offers one of the most planted rides I’ve ever come across. It is the very definition of solid, the epitome of robust and strong. I suspect you could throw it off a cliff and it would just bounce and get back up, laughing. Yet despite this, it doesn’t feel overbuilt or slow. It feels agile.
Spec choices undoubtedly help here – the wheels and tyres in particular. The Rolf Prima Ares 4s are light at a claimed 1,365g for the pair, wide at 27mm and aero with a 42mm deep snub-nosed profile and just 16 spokes at the front and 20 at the rear. On these wheels the 28mm Schwalbe One tyres came up closer to 30mm and rolled happily at 85psi, offering loads of grip thanks to the larger contact patch and lower pressure, and a smooth, cushioned passage across uneven surfaces.
Given all this, the Luna sprang into life with a nimbleness more befitting a lighter bike, and carried speed in a fashion more akin to an aero racer than a traditional round-tubed bicycle.
The rest of the components performed as they should: the Ultegra Di2 shifted crisply and loses out to Dura-ace
only in terms of looks and a few extra grams (but wins on price); the Calfee-designed finishing kit looked the part and functioned as well as any finishing kit realistically can. That is, the bars didn’t fall off, the 27.2mm seatpost had a welcome touch of flex and the stem was black. No one needs logos on their stems.
Still, all this is immaterial without the right frame to bring it all together, and in this respect the Luna Pro doesn’t just shine, it positively radiates with all the intensity of the sun.
Reactionary racer
What this bike does that others don’t is to temper its stiffness with a shock-absorbing edge while providing an overarching layer of feedback and just a hint of spring. It’s a bit like having the bass, mid and treble on a hi-fi set harmoniously so that the frequencies are at once apparent yet homogenous.
The Luna isn’t so stiff that it fails to track the road, nor so absorbent that it drowns feedback. There’s life in it – the bike reacts to the road surface but doesn’t lose its footing on the descents, and thanks to its balance and torsional stiffness I could really steer it from the hips, rocking as opposed to wrestling the bike through corners as the frame reacted to the road almost like it had suspension. To check it wasn’t just the tyres I pumped them up to 110psi, and lo, the Luna still handled impeccably.
It isn’t perfect, being a bit hefty up the climbs, and having leant it to a colleague who is the same height as me but 8kg lighter at 71kg, apparently it’s also somewhat uncomfortable. I disagree in the main but admit the Luna’s robustness is perhaps more befitting the heavier rider (although tube stiffness can be rider-tuned, I can’t comment as to what difference that would make).
Yet these are minor bugbears in the midst of what is a class act in every other way. Those lugs will be polarising of course, but I can’t imagine a rider who wouldn’t instantly take to the Luna’s well-honed ride.
There’s life in it – the frame reacted to the road almost like it had suspension