In bike racing, the streets of France and Italy aren’t just the sport’s arenas. They also serve as its catwalks. While fashion houses hit Paris and Milan to show off new collections, bicycle brands do the same with yet unreleased models, with the best riders in the world sitting atop them to, yes, win races but also to sell the bike to the masses.
This strategy means that we get to see the latest and the greatest well before they are available for purchase, by which point the cycling media has done its job of whipping the public into a frenzy ahead of the official launch date. Or something like that.
The prototype was the talk of the Critérium du Dauphiné well before it won the stage on its racing debut. Here was an aero bike created to push the envelope and, perhaps, even test the patience of the UCI. Factor asked itself just how fast can a race bike be? And the ONE is its definitive answer.
(Image credit: Future / Jamie Williams)
If, like me, you’re a bike nerd, then the new Factor One is probably the most exciting race bike that you’ve seen in the last five years. We already know that it’s like nothing else on the market; we already know that it’s been independently tested as one of the fastest in the world, but what we don’t know is what it’s like to ride…until now! I got on a plane to Girona to find out.
With most bikes you can take an educated guess about how it’s going to ride, before even swinging a leg over it; you can study the geometry chart and the tube profiles or perhaps ride the previous generation.
With the ONE though, the rule book has been well and truly torn up, and yes, we did ask Factor if the radical design will still be legal in 2026.
The Surprises Keep Coming
At the launch of the bike, I was expecting to have to step back in time to my university days where I studied aerodynamics. However, surprisingly, the main focus was on geometry instead, so I suppose we’d better start there:
Director of Engineering, Graham Strive, was keen to get across that it’s not Factor’s job to tell a rider how to ride a bike or indeed how to sit on a bike, instead it has studied…