Foldable Bikes Party: How weird bikes improve normal road bikes

Thursday, 20 October 2016

How weird bikes improve normal road bikes

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If a road bike has mountain-bike tires, disc brakes and a suspension fork, is it still a road bike? Drop-bar machines keep getting weirder, and that’s a good thing — especially for those of us who just want a normal road bike.

This year at Interbike I rode a 3T Exploro — the brand’s aero gravel bike (yes, really; that’s a thing now) — with a 1x hydraulic group, a Lauf suspension fork and 2in WTB Ranger 27.5 tires. Aside from the drop handlebars, it was pretty hard to distinguish from a hardtail mountain bike in aesthetics and performance.

For road bikes, the big weird trickledown is comfort. Comfort. That word used to be anathema. We’d all but spit it out as a withering description of slow, heavy bikes for old people

Have we gone too far? Heck, no.

I love weird bikes for three reasons. One, they’re good for a laugh when you’re with your buddies. Look at that thing! And two, they can be surprisingly fun to ride in specific situations, re-infusing that childlike sense of play unhampered by The Rules so many self-serious roadies self-impose.

But that strongest reason for weirdness is this: As creative brands and builders push the various parameters of what a road bike can be, many of the mainstay bikes in the middle of the road become more capable. With the landscape widening, a plain old road bike can expand in range and still seem pretty tame.

Super-fat clinchers like the 42mm fatties on Cannondale’s Slate are too much for most of us (and curiously devoid of tread, but that’s another story), but the 25mm tires that are now standard on endurance road and even road race bikes? That’s just good sense. What we now accept as logical for comfort, grip and rolling resistance used to be downright crazy when no bikes came with anything wider than 23. But next to XXX? Those 25s look pretty reasonable.

You can read more at BikeRadar.com