GIANT DEFY ADVANCED PRO 1
£3199 › The endurance legend enjoys its latest evolution
The Defy is a key bike for Giant. It’s the brand’s biggestselling bike, so any time a new Defy arrives on the scene you know it’s been thought about long and hard.
The new Defy shares the slender dropped stay design of the previous generation and Giant’s signature oversized OverDrive head-tube. Similarly, this model is disc brakeonly, albeit updated with flat mounts and fully internal hose routing.
As an endurance bike, designers worked on compliance, front and rear. At the back, the Defy features the company’s D-shaped D-Fuse seatpost design, first seen on the TCX. It’s not just the shape of the post that contributes to compliance, either – the material and fibre orientation make the post flex foreand-aft in a controlled manner, which you can really feel when riding.
Up front, Giant has introduced a D-Fuse handlebar, using that D-shaped profile. The effect here is just as pronounced: when you’re up on the hoods during a climb and honking on the bar it feels like any other, but get down in the drops on a descent and you can feel the comfort-giving flex. Giant designed the bar so the fibre orientation allows it to flex when being ‘pushed’, like the downward pressure of your weight shifting if you hit a rut or pothole. When you pull on the bar, when sprinting, for example, it’s 30 per cent stiffer than the company’s stiff Contact SLR bar.
The bar is held in place with Giant’s Stealth stem, designed to keep the front-end fuss free and to internally route the cables. On the top-of-the-range Di2 model this works superbly as the hydraulic hoses and Di2 cables route together. On the mechanical models it’s a sort of halfway house; the gear cables route along the stem and underneath the shroud, which bolts on top, but the hoses still route in a more
traditional way into the port on the head-tube.
Shimano’s brilliant mechanical Ultegra handles shifting and stopping, and the 50/34 with wide 11-34 cassette means you’ve got a very wide spread of gears, with a 1-1 bottom gear that’ll keep you turning the cranks on the steepest climbs. Giant hasn’t skimped on the brake rotors, using Shimano’s excellent IceTech units, although we’d choose a 160mm front rotor for our XL bike.
On the road, the compliant yet stiff chassis drifts from butterflyon-a-breeze smoothness to solid, responsive attack mode when in a fast corner or technical descent. The tubeless 28mm AC1 tyres provide a spectacular blend of cushioning and grip, and run on a great set of carbon rims rotating on quality hubs with DT Swiss internals.
Giant includes its RideSense sensor, which attaches to the non- drive chainstay to provide you with speed and cadence data, so while not watts they’re the next best things.
Brake rotor size aside,our other niggle is the Contact SL saddle, in Neutral guise. It’s fairly flat in profile and didn’t feel as comfortable to this tester as the Prologo on some of the others on test, but saddles are a personal thing.
The Defy is a superb bike. It blends comfort and a vibration-controlled ride with a snap in its handling and responses that put a smile on your face. The price might be the lowest here, but you really enjoy comfort and speed at the very highest level.