As one of the two main events for the Cyclingnews Awards, sorting out which are the best gravel bikes wasn’t an easy one. I say ‘are’ rather than ‘is’ because the more testing we completed as a team on the cohort of bikes, the more we came to the realisation that there isn’t a single ‘best gravel bike’.
The genre is so diverse, as diverse as the needs of individual riders and their respective ambitions, that we’ve decided to not name an overall best. Deciding the best overall between a race-oriented bike that’s very good at being a gravel race bike, and a gnarly pseudo-MTB that’s incredibly good in that space is like comparing chalk and cheese, and deciding for some reason that cheese is better.
In order to keep things relevant we’ve also implemented a price cap of £4,000, or the equivalent in dollars or euros, as we have done with our road bikes grouptest. According to our research, somewhere between £3,000 and £4,000 is the most common price bracket for consumers looking for a new bike, so with this in mind we called in as many gravel bikes as we could and set about testing them back to back.
From that testing, we’ve picked out four that we all loved for distinct reasons: A brilliant option if you want to go fast off (and on) road, a grin-inducing monster that sits at the very edge of what it means to be a gravel bike, a veritable champion of versatility that’s prime for bike-packing, and one that represents an excellent value all-rounder.
Collectively we’ve learned a few things in the midst of testing that, regardless of anything else, will help you as and when you come to buy a new bike, and we will be sharing all of our learnings in due course. For now, though, let’s get into our winners.
Most fun
If having fun is your aim then the YT Szepter should be top of your list. It never failed to put a smile on our faces, especially the more lumpy and steep the terrain got. The geometry is so different to everything else that it felt like a different genre of bike for a lot of the time. Unsurprisingly, given the long and slack geometry and the suspension fork, it was easily the most confidence inspiring descender, though interestingly not necessarily any faster. More comfortable, but if you’re happy getting rattled about you won’t actually gain any real time over a rigid bike in general terms.
What really surprised us was how well it climbed. The very steep seat tube angle, borrowed from the brands mountain bikes presumably, in…
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