The grit awards
INTERESTING RAVEL BIKES HAS INTENSIFIED EVEN FURTHER THIS YEAR AS HOME BASED ADVENTURES HAVE REMAINED PREVALENT. HERE ARE FOUR DO IT ALL CONTENDERS FOR YOUR OFF ROADING, ROAD RIDING AND BIKEPACKING DREAMS
The gravel genre has captured the imagination of the adventurous cyclist. What started out as a niche has become a genuine trend and a platform for freedom, allowing you to step out of your front door and straight into an adventure, regardless of terrain.
Of the many gravel bikes that have been put through their paces by CyclingPlus in the past year, the four on test here represent the whole spectrum. The Boardman ADV 9.0 (£1800) comes with a lean carbon frame and relatively affordable price tag, while the stylish and sleek Cinelli King Zydeco (£2849) is pitched at gravel (and road) speed. Taking things up a notch in both price and spec is the Pearson Off Grid (£4000) from the celebrated Brit brand, which again has a road-influenced design aimed at two-wheel speed. Completing the quartet is the innovative Cannondale Topstone Lefty (£7500) with its unique fork design and gravel suspension: a do-it-all contender unlike anything else.
But will any scoop our various Bike of the Year awards? Time to hit the grit and gravel, tarmac and trails of Salisbury Plain to find out…
Boardman was an early adopter of the gravel genre. The original ADV was an aluminium machine with mountain bike-derived 650b wheels and an attitude that was all about getting rough and ready in the dirt. This new ADV 9.0 (£1800) is a rather more refined affair that is, we are happy to report, still very much up for getting down and dirty.
The jewel in the crown is the premium C10 carbon frame, tipping the scales at 990g, and the light 420g gravel fork. That’s light for gravel – in fact, it’s a weight that’s respectable for a road bike and makes the Boardman the second lightest on test here (the Pearson is 70g leaner) despite the cheapest price tag. The frameset’s 71.5-degree head angle slackens the steering for off-road stability but doesn’t feel lazy on tarmac, while the 73-degree seat angle puts you in the power position directly over the cranks for swift acceleration both on road and off. With 38c tyres fitted, the 50mm fork offset gives a relaxed trail figure of 65mm.
The gearing is a clever mix of Shimano’s gravel-based GRX components. The 2x double chainring at the front won’t please hardcore gravelistas, but for real-world usability 22-speed is still the best (and that’s speaking as a 1x gravel devotee). The bike has Shimano’s top mechanical gravel GRX810 mechs front and rear, with GRX600 shifters. The ‘adventure’ gearing of a 46/30 tooth chaining combination might see die-hard roadies scoff at being under geared for the asphalt, but I never found myself wanting more. The 30/32 front chainring combo will keep the pedals turning on the most severe slopes when others would be reduced to walking. Shifting is crisp and stopping duties, handled by GRX400 brakes, are smooth and powerful, with the basic RT30 disc rotors staying free of screeches, even in the mud.
The ADV’s 590mm stack and 392mm reach is sporty without being stretched and makes for a good place to spend time in the saddle. Off road, this Boardman rides with a thrilling urgency – it’s responsive and rapid yet handles bumps with a stability that keeps you tracking true.
The ADV 9.0 is largely finished with ownbrand components. The simple alloy stem is stiff
The ‘adventure’ gearing of a 46/30t chain might see die-hard roadies scoff at being under geared, but I never wanted more
Off road, this Boardman rides with a thrilling urgency: responsive and rapid yet handles bumps with stability
and well finished, though I did occasionally catch a knee on the stem’s sharp rear and pronounced bolt fixtures. The flared alloy bar makes for assured handling when descending off road, and the hoods don’t sit at a funny angle when riding on tarmac. The Prologo Akero AGX saddle has generous padding.
The ADV’s charms far outweigh the relatively modest price. The chassis is tightly stiff and highly responsive, and the 38c Panaracer GravelKing SK tyres are impressive: compliant and grippy off road, fast-rolling (for gravel treads) on tarmac, and also tubeless ready (the wheels are tubeless compatible too).
Though the bike doesn’t come tubeless ready, this is the next best thing. Just add sealant and fit the valves and you’ll get more tyre pressure adjustment and the elimination of pinchpunctures, while there are a couple of spare tubes in the mix. According to Boardman, the ADV’s wheelset was built to be tough and the 1950g overall weight certainly bears that out.
The bold and beautiful
Iconic Italian outfit Cinelli was founded in 1947 by pro rider Cino Cinelli. The brand made its name producing stems, handlebars and saddles, and it has long blended performance pedigree with beautiful graphic design. The King Zydeco (£2849) holds true to Cinelli’s rep with a finish that’s bold compared to its rivals.
The frame has plenty going on. There’s a muscular head tube, a boxy down tube, oversized bottom bracket and curved dropped chainstays, which produce a generous tyre clearance of 47c in 700c or a massive 2.1-inch in 650b. In contrast to the down tube, the top tube is slender. The idea being that, if you drew a diagonal line from the top of the head tube down to the rear wheel axle, everything below that line is designed to be torsionally rigid to maximise power transfer and handling. Likewise, everything above the line is designed to offer compliance and to dampen vibrations.
The Columbus Futura fork, like Rondo’s ground-breaking flipped fork, offers a switchable dropout. With a bit of wrangling, you can alter between endurance and gravel
friendly steering or a racier alternative by changing the fork offset from 47mm to 52mm. The 47mm offset combined with the 72.5-degree head angle and 38c tyres creates an endurance bike-esque 62mm of trail. Flip to the 52mm and you get a 57mm trail that’s much more akin to a race bike.
In either guise, the King Zydeco is a gravel bike coming from the road-bike space. Its head and seat angles (also 72.5-degrees) combined with a relatively low 576mm stack and long 389mm reach make it an aggressive machine; it’s a bike that’s just as happy thrashing along on tarmac as it is on hard-packed gravel roads, and it wouldn’t be out of place in cyclocross either.
The Zydeco handles responsively due to the mid-range Tifosi stem and flared bar, with the subtle 5-degree flare on the bar feeling great off road and not overly wide on tarmac. The mix-and-match approach to Shimano’s GRX is in full effect, with lower-end 400 for the brakes, and a mix of 600 and top-end 800 for the drivetrain. The 1x setup matches a 40-tooth chainring with a huge range 11-42 cassette, and works efficiently both up and down the block. The ride quality is firm yet forgiving thanks to the quality bar tape and Selle Italia’s Novus Boost saddle – one of the best short perches around.
The Zydeco is running on Miche’s Graff SP wheelset and Impac CrossPac 38c tyres. The wheels are well put together, and at 1685g a pair they’re pretty decent for a sub £500 wheelset. They’re tubeless ready but the 19mm inner width, while spot-on for a wide road tyre, doesn’t do a great job in shaping the Impac’s 38c CrossPac tyre and it splays out from the narrow rim in lightbulb fashion.
The tread works well enough in a straight line, but get to a corner and the squared shoulders squirm, leading to a feeling of the rear tyre washing out and the front end being plagued with understeer. Reducing the tyre pressure helps, but as the bike doesn’t come setup tubeless there’s a limit to how much pressure you can release without enticing pinch-punctures.
Going off grid
Founded in 1860, Pearson cycles hold the prestigious title of the world’s oldest bike shop in London. The Pearson family still runs things, and this is the company’s first foray into carbonfibre gravel. With a steep 73-degree seat angle and 72-degree head angle, the Off Grid (£4000) is at the competitive end of the gravel endurance genre. It’s a bike that’s easy to ride rapidly
Of the many gravel bikes that have been put through their paces the four on test here represent the whole spectrum
The Off Grid is up there with high-performance go-anywhere bikes, such as Cervélo’s Aspero or 3T’s Exploro RaceMax
and has no slack, mountain bike-influenced, front-end geometry.
The frame feels taught and stiff in the right places, and the response to powerful pedalling is instant. It’s up there with high-performance go-anywhere bikes, such as Cervélo’s Aspero or 3T’s Exploro RaceMax. Pearson hasn’t skimped on the fixtures, however, and the Off Grid boasts mudguard eyelets, a bento box mount, triple bottle bosses and rear rack mounts, so it can easily handle bikepacking.
My XL comes with a 609mm stack height and 383mm reach, which mirrors a fast road endurance bike. The 50mm fork offset combined with the head angle and 38c tyres creates a 62mm trail figure, again a number embedded in endurance road-bike design. This means the bike responds quickly to steering inputs, making it a handling joy on- and off-road, providing you don’t venture into technical singletrack MTB territory. It’s absolutely at home on hard-packed fire roads, bike paths and byways, and can be ridden at some seriously impressive velocities off road.
The surefooted stiffness in the chassis meant that I relied on both the contact points and the tyres to increase the comfort levels on rough surfaces. At the rear, Fizik’s gravel-specific and short Argo saddle is a triumph in off-road shock absorption. Up front, I would’ve preferred a gravel-specific bar over the narrow Deda Zero 100 alloy unit, which is fine for road but something with flare at the drops is preferable.
The Arisun tyres are new to me. The 38c Gravel Plus design comes up broader than 38mm on the smart Pearson carbon wheelset, closer to 41mm when measured. The V-shaped studded tread works well on the road and hardpacked gravel, and is compliant enough. The stiff sidewalls of these tubeless-specific tyres didn’t really agree with any tyre pressure adjustment, and on a rocky section of gravel at 33 PSI they unseated themselves and burped out most of their pressure and sealant.
The Hoopdriver Bump and Grind wheelset from Pearson impresses. The wheels feel tight and stiff – much like the Off Grid’s chassis – and they’re light for a set of tough carbon gravel
wheels at just 1410g a pair. The bike’s overall weight of 9.28kg establishes the Off Grid as slick on the road and when ascending on both asphalt and trails. If more rocky and extreme terrain is your bag, then the Off Grid can be run with 650b wheels and tyres up to 55mm wide, which would certainly provide more tyre compliance over the rough stuff.
The drivetrain and braking all come from Shimano’s top-end gravel-specific GRX800 line. It’s available in a multitude of builds, but I opted for a GRX800 1x setup that mixes a 40t chainring with a huge 11-42 rear cassette. The matching 810 hydraulic braking is superb, leaving very little to fault here.
Return of the kingpin
Cannondale brought lightweight bike suspension to the world of gravel in 2019 with its innovative, rear suspension ‘Kingpin’ system on its all-carbon Topstone – a bike that became a finalist in 2020’s Bike of the Year. The Kingpin design uses a pivot at the top of the seatstays, which runs on a maintenance-free bearing and uses the flex in the carbon stays and a seat tube engineered to act like a leaf spring to provide 30mm of suspension travel at the saddle.
Cannondale’s innovative Lefty fork design has appeared on a drop-bar bike before with the ground-breaking Slate. Cannondale had a major redesign of the mountain-bike Lefty in 2018 and this fork is paired down for gravel (the weight is 1340g for the carbon version compared to the MTB’s 1446g). This reshape allows for 47mm tyres in 650b and 45mm in 700c with a rear matching 30mm of (suspension) travel. Another advantage of the Lefty is that you don’t have to remove the front wheel to fix a puncture.
What this Topstone (£7500) gives you is so much more control. The fork has fast reactive travel and if you factor in the huge 47c tyres, then the off-road capability is magnified. The tyres, like most mountain bikes, have differential treads – the front Venture tyre has block edges, which bite in the corners to provide grip, while the rear has a much slicker tread pattern that’s great for helping transfer your pedal power into forward motion efficiently.
The bike’s overall weight of 9.28kg establishes this bike as slick on the road, and when ascending on both asphalt and trails
It’s the same with cyclocross and it’s strange that it’s taken so long for road and gravel bikes to catch on to this way of thinking. Cannondale deserves credit for such a well thought-out spec.
The ‘mullet’ drivetrain (small in the front, large at the back) mixes SRAM’s offerings from road and mountain for a massive range over only 12 speeds from the 10-50 cassette. This means you have an easiest gear that’ll keep you ascending when most will be walking, and at the other end a gear that, I’d say, is plenty for the fastest of off-road riders and for most on the road. The jumps between gears are larger than smooth pedalling roadies are used to, but in low traction situations you just don’t tend to shift around your gears quite so much.
I’d like to have seen the bar have more flare in the drops as I like more wrist clearance when riding down in the drops off road. It’d also be good to have a second set of wheels – 700c perhaps with a more all-round tyre package so this could be a one-bike-for-all solution. Yet the ability to traverse bad surfaces is class-leading. It retains the Topstone’s wonderful handling: quick but not twitchy, stable but not dull. It’s arguable that this Lefty-equipped bike opens up whole new terrain to explore. When you combine its mountain-goat gearing, controlled compliance from the suspension, generous tyres and the handling you get arguably the most capable gravel bike around.
Star of gravel
I’ve ridden some brilliant cheap gravel bikes but nothing comes close to the considerable chops of the Boardman ADV 9.0. For that reason, it is the winner of 2021’s Value Bike of the Year.
The Cinelli King Zydeco is a fast-riding bike with nimble handling… in a straight line. The rolling stock lets it down. I switched to a set of carbon gravel wheels with a broader rim and better tyres and it transformed the ride. It’s reasonably good value for money, but the chassis deserves better tyres and wheels.
The Pearson Off Grid is an exceptionally fast and fun bike that proves once again that Pearson can mix it with the majors. I’d have preferred a tyre that was more compliant and the bar could really do with a bit of flare, but with Pearson’s glowing reputation for customer service these tweaks could be made on ordering.
Cannondale’s awesome ground-breaking Topstone Lefty is a phenomenal companion for tough terrain and for riding at speeds over more traditional gravel routes, and it’s the ultimate way to expand your horizons.
Cannondale’s awesome ground-breaking Topstone Lefty is a phenomenal companion for tough terrain