A road bike with bona fide front suspension — this is the new Specialized Roubaix. While my colleague Warren Rossiter has ridden the new Roubaix quite a bit in Belgium and in England, and I have been rattling it over dirt roads in Colorado, I tested the Roubaix Expert Ui2 model at the Peter Sagan VIP Ride in southern California. I was interested to find out how the bike felt in pack riding on relatively smooth roads.
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A few of us at the Sagan ride were on Roubaix demo bikes with the distinctive Future Shock atop the headset. Many riders including Sagan did the same thing when stopped at a light or a rest stop; they would press the bars down to feel the two centimeters of easy travel and the spring-loaded return.
It doesn’t take much force to get the bars to bob up and down on the steerer, especially if you are using the soft or medium spring in the shock. When at a stop, it feels weird. Similarly, there’s no getting around the aesthetics; the Future Shock looks like a giraffe in a turtleneck.
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Once on the road, though, the bike’s front end doesn’t feel different most of the time. Even when riding smooth road and watching the stem bobbing along, it doesn’t feel unstable or like it’s even really moving.
When hitting abrupt hard bumps you can feel it move, but not necessarily in a bad way. However, it dives under hard braking, which is an odd sensation to have the bars drop by two centimeters.
Rougher terrain
SWAT storage
Bottom line… suspension works
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