Bike tech explained

Your quickfire guide to bike jargon

Endurance bike

● A road bike designed to be ridden for longer distances. It’s created with rider comfort in mind (versus out-and-out speed), and will often be designed with more relaxed geometry to cater for riders who aren’t as well-trained and flexible as the pros. This test includes three endurance bikes and one race bike, though there’s some overlap.

Geometry

● Geometry refers to the lengths and angles of a bike frame’s tubes, which largely dictates how a bike will feel to ride, as well as the range of ride positions you can adopt.

Cable routing

● Cable routing is an important part of bicycle frame design, especially for mechanical groupsets. Internal cable routing – which all of our test bikes feature to some degree – sees cables (and hydraulic brake hoses) enter and exit the frame for neater looks and marginal aero gains. Good cable routing will reduce kinks and resistance points, helping your gears to shift smoothly.

Non-series components

● Sometimes, bike manufacturers will spec components that are not standard to the chosen groupset. While these are compatible, they’re often heavier, slightly less efficient or wear a little faster than the standard components. Chainsets, chains and cassettes are common things to be swapped out, and it’s normally done to save money, or could be down to availability of components.

105 code names

● Not all Shimano groupset components carry the same name. In Shimano’s parlance, 105 R7000 is the ‘standard’ rim brake mechanical variety, while R7020 is the disc brake mechanical version we see on all our test bikes. For reference, any groupset with Di2 electronic shifting has 50 or 70 in its designation.

Shimano Di2

● The Di2 stands for ‘digital integrated intelligence’, Shimano’s version of electronic shifting, and makes changing gears faster than when using mechanical systems.