My Winter Bike Set Up | Are Gravel Bikes Best?

My 6 month review on the Specialized Diverge Comp E5 having used it on both gravel and more recently on road throughout winter. Is this a bike that can do it all?

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So I’ve been cycling now for just over half a year and in that period of time I have owned three different bikes well four actually because one of them got nicked but for the sake of the video Let’s just call it three but anyway this is my latest setup that I have been

Loving riding over the winter period today I’m going to go through it tell you what I like about it what I don’t like about it and just in general review the bike a little bit and before we get into it I’ll caveat the video by saying

This is by no means the perfect bike but for me I have been having a blast on it so the bike this is the specialized diverge comp E5 and I believe it’s one or two specs above that entry level diverge it is an aluminium gravel bike

And it retails for around 2,000 quid and Weight Wise it comes in at around 10.2 kg so pretty standard for an entrylevel bike uh especially around this price point so the reason I picked up a gravel bike to begin with was basically because I wanted to ride gravel I never saw

Myself becoming a road Road cycling Fanboy which I now am and the versatility of the gravel bike did always mean that even if I did become a road cycling Fanboy I’d have the best of both worlds being able to go off-road and onroad with the gravel bike so now

Basically 80% of the riding that I do is on road just because it’s more accessible and I find it a bit easier to do than gravel riding so what you’re looking at here is basically a gravel bike set up as a winter road bike the main change that I’ll come on to later

In the video is the wheels and the tires have been changed from the stock ones to specific Road ones now and to be honest it does a job on road I should be getting a dedicated road bike though in the coming weeks fingers crossed uh and

This can go back to being a proper gravel bike so enough waffle in let’s get into the specs of the bike starting with the group set so this bike runs saram Apex one by it is saram sort of entry-level gravel group set and as the

Name suggest it’s a one by which I have found to be really really good on the gravel stuff but what I do find is on road the top end gearing isn’t quite there so when uh I’m out with Road cyclists on specific Road bikes they can

Drop me pretty easily because at the top end of speed I just don’t have much I can’t pedal fast enough to gain any more speed when I’m above like 340 km an hour and another thing to note is weirdly that on road I find the chain drops

Quite a lot so I have installed a chain catcher to try and mitigate that basically so overall the group set is good for gravel and you can get by on road it’s just not ideal with the one by setup I would prefer a two by setup with

More gearing in the top end it also has hydraulic disc brakes which I found to be an enormous upgrade from mechanical disc brakes I’ve never tried Rim brakes so I can’t comment on that but the hydraulic disc brakes make me feel a lot more comfortable and provide much more

Stopping power especially when going down the hills so one of the main differences between this spec of the diverge compared to the base level model is the Future Shock 1.5 technology that it has installed in the stem of The Handlebar so this is basically a suspension technology that specialized

Used in the stem of the handle bars that dampens the ride when you go over the rough stuff now just let me get my notes out for this one it comes with three different Springs so you can adjust How firm it is based on your preference and

It’s of course a proper gravel specific feature doesn’t really add any benefit to the road riding and when I was doing my research on this bike prior to buying it it seems like a lot of people think this is a bit of a gimmick but I have to

Say from my experience of riding it uh across various different terrains of gravel I’ve been on some real rough stuff up in dumri and Galloway like loose Rock gravel this thing really really dampens the ride and takes the impact off your arms so for me I’m a

Massive fan of that Tech uh on gravel on road neither here nor there doesn’t really do much so on the topic of handlebars one thing that I don’t necessarily like about the bike purely from an Aesthetics point of view is the handle bars themselves they sort of dip

In in the middle here I just don’t think it looks as clean as a flat bar but otherwise they’re really sturdy so they are gravel specific bars again 44 CM wide and they have some kind of flare as well just to help with stability on the

Rough stuff and they do a good job on that I would take preference to a slightly narrower bar though considering the majority of the riding that I do is on road so moving on to the only upgrade I have made on the bike so far and that is the wheels and the Tires and I have to say off the bat these have made an absolutely unbelievable difference to how the bike rides and how it feels compared to the stock wheels and tires that it came with I’ll go over this current setup and then I’ll go back to what originally came

With the bike and it stocks up and what I did with that as well so these are Hunt’s aerodynamicist 44 car road wheels and they are paired with the schi pro one road tires 30 mil width these are as well and they’re set up tubeless as well

Which is always nice now putting these on has made a bigger change than I could have ever imagined it just feels like a more premium road bike now compared to when I was riding on the road with the gravel setup it was a bit sort of clunky

It just didn’t feel ideal really and I really quite like the 30 mil width on the tires it isn’t too thin where I feel unstable on the road but it isn’t too fat where it feels slow and sluggish and they have reduced the weight drastically on the bike which again helps with how

It feels the speed and that kind of thing now the stock wheels that the bike came with are the axis Elite these are aluminium gravel Wheels I think by specialized and they come as stock with 38 mil Pathfinders but I upgraded these to 45 mil pinell cinerat gravel Ms which

Were top top top tires on the gravel stuff absolutely bulletproof bike also has massive clearance I think you can fit up to 47 mil tires on this if you want the biggest I’ve got is 45 and they were sound no issues at all back to the

Wheels I have had too many issues with these wheels to say that I can recommend them or that they are good Wheels I’ve had the free Hub breake on the last two pairs that I’ve got but fortunately because I bought the bike new they were under warranty and

Specialized kindly repaired them for me which was a positive but yeah overall I have really come to light this bike the last few months of riding it with this setup have been phenomenal it’s not the ideal road bike but it does a job and I’ll always have a soft spot for it

Because this is the first bike that properly got me into cycling but as I mentioned earlier in the next few weeks I should be getting an upgraded road bike and this will go back to being a gravel specific bike that’ll start to get a lot more use in the summer because

We are going to be signing up to a couple of different gravel events and Road events so stay tuned for that one