Cannondale is no stranger to shaking things up a bit but the new Slate is an especially bold move. It’s a road bike of sorts but with a very broad definition of the word 'road'. Built with 42mm-wide slick tyres, a specially built suspension fork with just 30mm of travel, disc brakes, and a surprisingly aggressive geometry that falls somewhere in between your typical race and endurance machines.
I recently flew out to Malibu, California to spend a day on the Slate on a mix of paved roads (both good and bad), dirt, and demandingly rocky pathways in the sunbaked hills overlooking the Pacific Ocean. While the experience was absolutely fun, the bike left me with plenty of questions that will have to be answered in the coming weeks and months.
What’s a Slate?
The Slate is so unusual that no discussion of its ride performance would be appropriate without a thorough explanation of the bike itself. Cannondale has seriously broken the mould here.
ADVERTISEMENT
The Slate is the road analogue of a 'plus' mountain bike
Instead of conventional 700c wheels with standard-width tyres, the Slate is designed around smaller 650b but ultra-fat 42mm-wide rubber – a combination that Cannondale says yields the same rollout (within a couple of millimetres) as a conventional 700x23mm setup. To further soak up the bumps, the front of the Slate features the radical Lefty Oliver, a road-specific version of Cannondale’s venerable single-sided, dual-crown suspension fork built around a carbon fibre outer chassis and a one-piece forged aluminum lower section.
Hitting the hills
Hitting the dirt
Rocketing back down
More questions than answers
You can read more at BikeRadar.com
via BikeRadar All the latest from BikeRadar.com http://ift.tt/1Y3kecA
No comments:
Post a Comment