This £11,500 Carbon Gravel Bike Is A Terrible Idea

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Moving on to a potentially controversial topic uh once again we are going to talk about specialized because they like doing really uh let’s hyperbolic fun things no they just got a very active marketing team they have get paid a lot of money to do good work specialized have in quotes the world’s lightest

Gravel bike it’s called the S Works Crux the Crux has for a long time been their cyc cross bike which now has basically rebranded into a gravel bike um it claims that it’s the lightest of its kind with a frame weight of 725 G and a complete build of 7.25 G it has

Clearance it uh 7.25 kg it has clearance for 47 Ms on 700s and 2.1 in tires on 650 BS which is the same as the diverge and it starts or it has a price of £1,500 that’s a sham red though so that is sham red is it yeah I

Mean several things of this topic firstly does this mean cyc cross as a bike design is dead obviously Cy happen but yeah because they’re not doing I mean everybody’s dropping it I think Ridley is probably one of the only Browns that’s still effectively making cycle cross bike KES who was big in the

UK for C bikes even they do a JX race now so it’s a gravel bike you can still do you can don’t get me wrong you still do cross on it but they’ve made them less Twitchy longer wheelbases it’s all a dual bike um so two things on this the

Lightest gravel bikes of its kind I just I just don’t get it don’t get it at all 725 G for a frame set that’s lighter the most road bike frame sets out of out there how do you make a frame lighter use less Caron now it’s gravel gravel is

Inherently depending on how bad you are obviously gravel I do is really bad you don’t do gravel you do mountain bik yes you do mountain biking on gravel bikes but see I would look at this think 2.1 in tie clearance perfect they’ve done that really well the tie clearance is

Excellent um I would have preferred see 700 by 50 cuz I think that’s where it’s going but 47 is still great 650b by 2.1 is right up my street but then I would be too nervous to ride the bike um I rode Rob’s Envy MOG the other day which

Is a very durable bike lovely but it it scares me in terms of how I just worried about snapping the bike so yeah uh I just don’t think the weight makes any my gravel bike for instance titanium it’s heavier but it’s 8.7 kilos as soon as I put my lights my

Bags and all the rubbish I put on it every single day um it’s closer to 13 kilos it’s just the the lighter just doesn’t make a difference in gravel specifically um and yeah uh I’m just worried like you’re taking carbon away where it most likely is needed most people race gravel or ride

Gravel don’t weigh 50 kilos will be heavier I I guess if you were performance focused cuz the the gravel race scene is now like an actual thing you know it’s big uh or it’s it’s very much growing and there’s lots of people out there which you’ll be thinking about doing gravel events

Rather than a sportif for example um and if you’re that kind of person that way inclined and you want to you know finish in the top 30% rather than the bottom 30% you might be thinking about well I want to be light I want to

Not load my bike up with stuff if I you know like classic crit racing like people do fourth cat crits on 15,000 race bikes which is the most terrifying thing in the world because inevitably you’re going to crash and it’s kind of the same thing here it there are people

Which will want a really light r a really lightweight gravel bike however I am forever challenging whether arrow is important and whether weight is important and I do not think either are I completely get what you’re saying there lighter and if you’ve got the money buy the bike I mean it’s your

Money spend it however you want to spend it but don’t be confused and thinking by buying a slightly heavier bike you’re going to be slower uh I had this argument with James worksman in the shop he races for ony team and does really well um and he’s been doing quite a few

Gravel races on francis’s bike that’s Scott which is also really light um skinnier tires to grown faster and but you look at the gravel um the what did the they had the world Champs qualify up here the grok and the fastest guy over there from inos was

Finished 34 km an hour so it’s it’s fast but it’s not aerodynamics where people talk about 40 km plus fast and that’s a couple of riders I think second place was almost 2 km an hour slower than him so Arrow like you said doesn’t play in

The weight’s one thing but one of my mates Jesse Yates who’s continuously coming top 10 in quite a lot of gravel events again big names he’s riding on a titanium bike with big tires so most of these events are quite long they’re not an hour long like cyc

Across they’re usually going to be out there for three four plus hours so being comfortable I think is going to be more of a thing than just the weight and the other thing is once again is if you don’t have confidence in your frame not snapping you don’t ride

The same you hear of a lot of old people that raced back in the early 2009 now riding carbon saying like sprinting wise they’re worried and no no it’s not an actual issue but they worried mentally about the bike snapping even though it won’t with this yeah does that have an

Effect I I like riding my titanium bike because I know when I go down something crazy it’s just not going to give out on me and I know the carbon probably weren’t either a good quality heavier carbon frame but it’s just in your mind and it slows me down what about carbon wheels

Though CU you ride Carbon wheels Carbon wheels stronger than no stronger than alloy wheels what about I was going to say carbon seat post but you ride a dropper dropper Post Yeah cuz that’s the kind of riding you do that’s the kind of gravel you do yeah well it’s it’s a drop

On mountain bike probably but yeah it’s inherently the problem is that gravel is road bike orientated and it’s not like mountain bike companies are developing it and specialized I might be completely wrong in this but I’m going to assume it’s a road division that’s Dei that’s developing their gravel bikes not their

Mountain bike division they’ll have different people for these kind of things and back in the day people just used to think that fast gravel you’re going to need a lighter bike tire clearance doesn’t matter cuz people are still going to ride skinny tires and they’re probably the first ones just

Gone like well let’s make the bike light and big tie clearance to cover all the bases and it’s it’s marketing it’s purely marketing it’s why we end up talking about specialized bikes a lot because their their marketing is so hyperbolic in terms of the lightest the best the everything canale as well yeah

Yeah but I mean what else do you expect but also it just shows that the gravel bike space generally is so so huge now that why wouldn’t someone do the lightest ever because someone’s going to want it we can sit here and knock it all

Day long but they sell a lot of bikes so it works yeah I mean these people are getting paid and not getting paid to give people good info they’re getting paid to sell more bikes that’s that’s the job MH and they’re doing it well so

I mean good on them I just like say it’s another thing 725 G say let’s say against most of the other Fram set will be the light ones will be 800 to 900 g a good set of gravel tires a 2.1 in is going to weigh 800 g a

Tire then you can buy like one with a thinner carcass where you’re probably going to slice it up more with uh sharp rocks and that’ll be 600 G so you save 200 g a tire there so that’s 400 G lighter meaning you can take that bike and add 400 gam to it

Just different tires do I guess if if you’ve got a larger volume Tire are you putting more sealant in it yes and also people panic so they put sealant in and then an event comes up it’s been 2 or 3 months they they’ve been told any

He top up the sealant and they just put more sealant in had a guy coming to The Bike Shop the other day with I think it was a leiter of sealant in each wheel which took the was I don’t know how he’s done it he must have just been syringing

In so if if you take your wheels round like the the bottom third of the tire the wheel was just full of sealant well we he’s going to he not going to get aure yeah but it would ride terribly as well but yeah um there’s there’s a lot of things I

Think ultimately what we’re getting at is there’s so many things about the gravel space that is inherently not light that spending a premium amount of money on a bike that is 500 grams lighter or a frame that’s 500 grams lighter it just seems like a waste of money the other

Topic to Broach with this obviously I’m biased because this is what we do as a shop but £15,000 for a gravel bike you don’t get to pick your tires you don’t get to pick your saddle you don’t get to pick your bars your stem you don’t get

To pick your gear ratios your geometry you don’t get to pick anything on this bike so you’re paying 115,000 almost every single person out there’s got different tire preference so instantly changing your tires now a good set of tires for this level of bikes going to cost you A Tire Plus getting it

Set up tubeless plus sealant and all these things for a bike shop so all of a sudden You’ bought this and you have to pay money on that you want to change your handlebar tape you want to change your uh Stam length possibly your bar

Width uh your saddle so all of a sudden it’s it’s not 115,000 it’s you’re going to be adding quite a bit of money to that just to get the bike the way you I will be honest though wanted specialized bikes do look great oh it’s a pretty

Bike that was what I thought as well it does look good I I want that bike I’m never buying that bike but I that they just always look good what it really needs to be is if 11 and a half Grand seems like a lot of money to you it’s

Definitely not worth investing in something that you’re going to throw around it’s going to get rocks you know flip up off your wheel and then hit it and stuff like that dipping it to bits exactly whereas if 11 and a half Grand is somehow pocket money

For you then first of all good for you but also then go for it why not do two bikes then though use that one for your D reavers your like Smooth gravel rids and then you get yourself something a bit more durable for like a custom steel

One like my Howa yes or Titanium or titanium which I mean I smashed through a brick wall with my titanium one broke my arm but the actual frame was still okay