Cer vélo R5
Team Jumbo-visma’s climbing bike is light and stiff. Who’d have guessed?
‘If you look back at the Porsche 911s of the 1980s, they were widow-makers and the performance wasn’t there. But look at a current generation GT2 and it’s like you can – you shouldn’t, but you can – get the groceries. It’s comfortable every day, and you can potter around town in it. It’s not temperamental when it’s cold in the morning. It just does what it has to do and doesn’t complain. I think that’s where this generation of bikes is now.’
So says Scott Roy, engineering manager at Cervélo and the man ultimately responsible for the latest R5.
Is it an everyday superbike? The underlying recipe hasn’t changed. The new model is an explicitly weight-focussed counterpart to the aero-everything S-series and it has already been proven at Worldtour level beneath the likes of Primož Roglič.
‘New’ is perhaps a strong word – it’s more a refinement of the existing platform – but the list of minor changes is lengthy and, with a frame weighing a claimed 703g for a 56cm, it all adds up to less than before – 16% less, to be precise.
Cervélo says it has upped comfort levels via a reduction in the longitudinal stiffness of the fork and a lowering of the seat cluster, increasing the length of seatpost able to flex in fresh air. On the frame stiffness front, Roy explains that experience and ‘a tonne of historical data’ led his team to target a head-tube-to-bottom-bracket stiffness ratio of 45%, but that this isn’t some sort of ‘golden ratio’ – it’s ever-evolving.
In keeping with a trend towards ever-more integration, the 2022 bike has its cables hidden entirely from view. This is achieved via a design debuted on the brand’s Caledonia-5 endurance road bike, where the fork steerer’s cross-section is U-shaped, creating a channel down its front in which to route hydraulic hoses. There are no gear cables with the electronic groupsets this bike is meant for, and indeed the frameset is not designed to accept mechanical groupsets at all.
What it does accommodate are larger tyres than ever, up to 34mm, meaning the R5 now offers as much clearance as the all-road Caledonia-5, albeit with a slightly more headdown riding position and no concessions to boring practicalities such as mudguard mounts.
What, no aero?
Despite the added comfort and tyre clearance, the R5 is speed-oriented, and director of product management Maria Benson is emphatic that
The R5 is one of the most rewarding climbers I’ve ever ridden, and downhill it is stable and confidence-inspiring
Cervélo’s ‘make riders faster’ ethos still applies: ‘Everything we do is based on that intention.’
That pursuit of speed hasn’t tempted Cervélo to go down the aerodynamic route in the way that other brands have with their climber’s bikes, such as the Specialized Tarmac and Cannondale Supersix. There are some subtle aero details, and the move to internal cables apparently saves 2.5W at 40kmh, but the R5 remains focussed on weight, and Roy also stresses the importance of how bikes make their riders feel: ‘The psychological aspect of sport is just as powerful as the numbers themselves.’
Hard and fast rules
Whatever the numbers say, the R5 feels extraordinarily effective on the road. Don’t let the slender climbing bike aesthetics mislead you – the R5 is preternaturally stiff, unyielding under pedalling in a way that invites all the worst kind of bike review clichés.
This is the part where I tell you it’s also silky smooth, absorbing bumps like a branded kitchen towel absorbs spilt tea. But it isn’t.
The ride is beautifully poised and thoroughly delightful, but this is no squishy endurance bike. The supplied 25mm tyres measure up close to 28mm wide on the broad Reserve carbon rims, and if you set them up tubeless you can safely reap the benefits of low pressures, but they don’t take the edges off a very racy personality.
The R5 is firm and fast, and over chipsealed back roads my test bike’s Sram Force etap
AXS levers buzzed gently when I rode on the tops. Yet the R5 is one of the most rewarding climbers I’ve ever ridden, and downhill it is stable and confidence-inspiring in defiance of its lightweight construction. At high speeds it responds to the lightest of touches, changing direction with surgical precision.
Descending prowess was apparently a key consideration for the bike’s designers on the principle that while it’s all very good making a bike climb well, races can equally be lost on the descents. I can confidently report they met the brief on this one.
The Cervélo R5 is an intriguing package, at once wilfully old-school in its approach and yet completely modern in the details of its design. Whether or not it makes sense, its creators can point to its successes in actual pro races, so credibility isn’t in question. And if you’re just in it for the ride, well, it’s really something.
Cast your mind back to April 2013. A group of Japanese students has just made the world’s longest roll cake at 130.68m (well someone had to use up those 2,682 eggs); Ant and Dec (aka PJ & Duncan) have finally bagged a Number 1 with the return of their 1994 hit Let’s Get Ready To Rhumble (the ‘h’ was a nod to both wrestling and the rhumba dance), and Cyclist issue 6 has just hit the shelves. And in it? A review of the Sensa Giulia.
It had a carbon frame and full Shimano DuraAce 9000 groupset, and yet it cost just £2,699. I can remember that day and I can remember wondering how on earth the price could be right – carbon bikes were still far from mainstream back then, and the groupset was the best part of two grand alone.
Fast forward to today and the Giulia is back amidst our pages, only this time it’s with Ultegra and this time I’m going to try incredibly hard to spell its name right. I before the U…
Borrowed speed
Sensa bikes hail from Holland, where like the majority of top-end manufacturers the company assembles its bikes from imported parts, hence the ‘Hand built’ graphic, rather than ‘Hand made in Holland’, on every frame.
As such, the design could be seen as quite Dutch, in that Holland is flat, and Holland is windy, and the Giulia Evo borrows heavily from the NACA handbook, which is somewhat like a tattoo artist’s catalogue only instead of koi-carp sleeves it’s full of airfoil shapes developed by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics.
Thus this isn’t a bike that has been windtunnel-tested per se, but it has been designed around proven wind-cheating shapes, from the tall, truncated down tube to the thin seatstays and narrow head tube. That said, this isn’t in fact the true Sensa aero flagship; that esteem goes to the Giulia Evo Aero, which has the same frame but built instead with a one-piece, internally routed bar/stem combo up front. Still, shod with 50mm wheels you get to understand at which fête the Giulia Evo is setting out its stall – straight-line speed.
I say straight-line speed for two reasons. First, because with 50mm deep wheels and the tall tubes there’s a decent amount of surface area for side-winds to act on, and while it ultimately wasn’t a problem, a few freak gusts blowing through hedgerow gaps did remind me I was
riding an aero bike. But the pay-off was that when I got my body position low and pedalled like fury, the bike surged forward and helped me hold it there like a true-blue (well, red) aero racer.
Because of this, sprinting on the Giulia is also a pleasing experience. The chassis is very stiff, so too the wheels, and that plus its aero pretensions conspire to make out-the-saddle, in-the-drops efforts a fun, teeth-gritting experience. And I needed to grit those teeth, because the knock-on effect of all this is, you guessed it, comfort.
Understood in context
On the scale of one to ‘pub bench on a winter’s day’, the Giulia comes in at around a seven, teetering just on the edge of where ‘firm’ meets ‘uncomfortable’, and saved only by running the tyres at relatively low pressures. I’d suggest that a trade-up to a pair of 28mm tubeless tyres from
The stiffness and sporty geometry of the frame help offset the feeling of heaviness by creating a responsive platform
the supplied 25mm tubed Schwalbes (the wheels support this) would provide noticeable comfort gains without affecting much else, such is the negligible difference in weight between 25mm and 28mm tyres these days.
Speaking of which, you may have noticed from perusing the stats on the previous page that this is not the lightest bike, tipping my scales at 8.4kg. That’s not crazy, but among today’s flock of disc brake racers, it is at the heavy end. However, the stiffness and sporty geometry of the frame do help to offset the feeling of heaviness by creating a responsive platform. And the kicker here – just as it was eight years ago – is that the Giulia Evo comes in at just a shade over three grand.
I’m not going to say three grand is cheap, but then no race bikes are cheap; cheap stopped a long time ago, probably around the time farm boys stopped racing butchers’ bikes at the Tour. Whether that’s OK is a discussion for another day, but I’d suggest that on the spectrum of road bikes now, a disc-braked, carbon-wheeled, Ultegra-equipped, 8.4kg aero-road bike coming in at £3,099 is decent value.
That’s not to say Sensa is alone with such offerings – there are a number of other brands doing sterling work at this price point too – but it does speak to how far bikes have come in eight years, and how closely Sensa has stuck to its 2013 Giulia blueprint: a lot of bike for not insane money.
When I played rugby as a kid, the pro I idolised most was an Argentinian hooker by the name of Mario Ledesma. Unlike contemporaries such as New Zealand’s Keven Mealamu or South Africa’s Schalk Brits, Ledesma lacked the flair and panache to throw a three-man miss pass or make a 40-yard line break. What he could do, however, was scrummage like an ox, hit endless rucks, make tireless tackles and throw accurate darts at lineout time – things that made him indispensable for both club and country during his illustrious 20-year playing career. Ultimately, Ledesma couldn’t do amazing things on a rugby pitch, but he could do all of the small things well, which made him a great rugby player.
My point? Like Ledesma, the Look 765 Gravel RS is not a bike that is breaking new ground in the gravel market, nor is it making claims to be lighter, faster or more compliant than its rivals. No, in the 765 Gravel RS, Look has simply made a gravel bike that does all the little things well and is all the better for it.
More than its cover
Confession time. When I first set eyes upon the 765 Gravel RS, I struggled to get excited. The geometry is pretty standard for a gravel bike
– the wheelbase and trail are long for stability and assured handling, the stack is high and the reach short for comfortable positioning – there are no fancy suspension systems, and at 8.9kg (medium) without pedals, it’s far from a featherweight.
Even the understated black and red paint job left me feeling a bit meh. Besides the funky noughties-looking stem and recessed cable entry on the head tube, I was feeling underwhelmed. But I guess I should know better than to judge a book by its cover.
On the very first ride, it began to click what this bike is all about. It started when I noticed how well the 765 Gravel handled. We’re now at that time of year when byways become sloppy with mud and trails that were once rideable are now questionable. Regardless of the condition, I always felt in full control of the bike, confident that I could pick a line on a descent or negotiate an off-camber corner and come out the other side upright.
Look claims to have put in a lot of work where handling is concerned, developing its steering components – fork, headset, stem and bars – as one system. I’d say it has paid off.
What Look has achieved with the 765 is to make sure that all the simple things you look for in a gravel bike are done well
It also helps that this particular build came with knobbly 40mm Hutchinson Touareg tyres, which though not the fastest on tarmac have such a generous tread I felt more anchored to the floor than an Insulate Britain protester.
As well as the squidgy tyres (the 765
Gravel has space for 700x40mm or 650x2.1in rubber), Look also attributes comfort to its 3D wave stays. These flattened, scrawny seatstays are claimed to offer 15% more compliance than round stays of the same dimensions. I’ll have to take Look’s word for that, but certainly the frame seemed to have bundles of compliance at the rear without resorting to suspension systems to achieve it.
Ready for adventure
I’m not one for epic off-road cycling adventures – that’s what comes of living within the M25 – but if I was, the Look 765 Gravel RS is the kind of bike I would use for such a ride. It’s comfortable,
it handles well and there are no fiddly parts that could potentially go wrong or overcomplicate things. It’s just a practical, well-put together machine. At £4,399, it is even reasonably priced in the grand scheme of how much bikes cost these days (which I know is a hell of a lot).
There are some changes I would make, however. This particular build came with a 2x Shimano GRX810 gravel groupset, which did not miss a beat because, well… it’s Shimano, but personally I would have preferred a 1x setup. Getting rid of that front mech means one less thing to go wrong – music to my technically incompetent ears.
I’d also consider my choice of tyres. The Touaregs may be battle-hardened, but for my gravel outings I’d appreciate something lighter than the claimed 550g for a bit more tarmacrolling zip.
With the 765 Gravel RS, Look has clearly not tried to reinvent the gravel bike. It hasn’t introduced a new way of looking at carbon layup; it hasn’t bolted on clever suspension systems; it hasn’t made an off-road bike as light or aero as a road bike. It isn’t going to win any awards for innovation. But what Look has achieved here is to make sure that all the simple things you look for in a gravel bike are done well, which combine to make a very good bike overall.
In fact it’s just like Mario Ledesma, only 101.1kg lighter.