Bianchi Arcadex
Bianchi’s latest gravel bike looks to have unfinished business
The process of reviewing a bike begins the first second I lay eyes on it. As I unbox I’m seeking out neat or unique features, or any interesting quirks that might stand it apart from its competitors. In this regard the Bianchi Arcadex stopped me in my tracks.
When I unpacked the Italian marque’s latest gravel machine (and its first dedicated gravel bike in carbon) my eyes were first drawn to the head tube, a beefy yet shapely construction that is more like a sculpted vase than a bicycle’s tube form. Then appeared a big, black, hexagonal plug on top of a mass of carbon at the junction of the down tube and seat tube.
My first thought was: surely not ? It looked suspiciously like Bianchi had utilised a frame intended for an e-bike, and simply sent it out minus the motor and electrical gubbins with a rubber cover blocking the sizable hole where, presumably, the charge port would be. Someone had some explaining to do.
That someone was Bianchi’s Claudio Masnata. ‘The peculiar shape of the frame allows the Arcadex to be an adaptable bike,’ he explained. ‘The frame is designed to be compatible with an electronic smart suspension system, and also to be an e-arcadex in the near future. The frame is ready to nestle the motor unit and integrated battery and the bung on top of the bottom bracket is where the charging port will be.’
So where does that leave this version of the Arcadex? Masnata suggested that the bike in this guise – without any electronic hardware – would only benefit from the frame’s oversized head tube and fork, with a stiff front end to ensure precise handling and a massive BB junction to deliver maximum pedalling efficiency.
I scratched my head. Had Bianchi really managed to produce a frame that could work just as well as an e-bike, an electronically damped bike and a conventional gravel bike? Or was this, as I suspected, Bianchi rushing to get something to market in the face of the current drought? It was time to find out.
School of hard knocks
As soon as I hit the trails I found myself questioning another of Masnata’s assertions. Comfort, he assured me, was something Bianchi had factored into the design, but I struggled to identify where. Those beefy tubes simply didn’t budge and there’s not even a skinny seatpost as a get-out-of-jail-free card. I felt as if I was taking the brunt of every jarring impact.
Normally, this is where I’d pull over to the side of the road and maybe drop my tyre pressures a bit to help find some relief, but as Bianchi has opted for clincher tyres (although the Alex rims are tubeless-compatible) there was only limited scope to win back some cushioning before risking pinch flats. This balancing act is not helped by the fact that the Arcadex is also quite hefty. The bike weighs in at 9.64kg, which means it has a tendency to barrel over stuff, lacking the nimbleness that I look for in a gravel bike. So far, then, not so good.
Jack of any trades?
What about on the road? With rigidity in spades, the Arcadex should redeem itself on smoother surfaces, right? Sadly not. The burly frame does give the sense of every ounce of power being transferred into propulsion, but the bike’s weight drags it back during accelerations and on steep climbs such that I was left wishing
This bike weighs 9.64kg, which means it has a tendency to barrel over stuff, lacking the nimbleness I look for in a gravel bike
I had the assistance of a motor. There’s nothing electric about the ride feel.
The biggest question for me, however, is why didn’t Bianchi simply wait? It sounds like it is onto something with the intelligent suspension system Masnata referred to. It’s called the
Hiride Endurance Adaptive Smart Suspension (ESAS), and is said to be a highly sophisticated, electronically controlled suspension system that offers either front or rear (or both) suspension units that automatically detect terrain and instantly adjust their settings accordingly.
It sounds pretty cool to me and seems ideal for gravel bikes, if possibly a bit on the heavy side – I’d certainly be excited to test it. But pushing the Arcadex out as a standard gravel bike hasn’t done Bianchi any favours. It feels like an attempt to market a bike as something it really isn’t.
I’m told that the electronic suspension version is likely to be in the 2022 range, so maybe that bike will redeem the Arcadex. In the meantime, Bianchi already has a perfectly decent alloy gravel bike in the Impulso Allroad, and it has the superb Zolder carbon cyclocross bike, as raced by three-time Cyclocross World Champion Wout van Aert. If Bianchi wanted to produce a premium carbon gravel bike, it should have combined what it knows from those two models and left the electronics to reside in its own separate category.
Heed the advice offered to us back in the 1980s by the Ghostbusters: don’t cross the streams.