Are endurance bikes slower than road race bikes?
Are endurance bikes actually slower than road race bikes in the real world? We did a speed test to find out
How about the new Van Rysel NCR CF, a bike that currently has a price tag of £2,000 on the Decathlon website? The full review will be live on road.cc in a few weeks time, but for now, with its wide tyre clearances and "do it all" geometry it'll do as our endurance bike for this mini-experiment. An endurance bike sits in the road bike category. It is generally considered to be something that is designed for comfort and efficiency over longer rides. For this reason, these bikes are very popular with recreational and club road riders.Compared to race bikes, endurance bikes typically have a higher front end, including a longer headtube, shorter reach , a longer wheelbase, and a front wheel that is further out in front of you. This makes it less agile but also less twitchy.
This isn't to say that endurance bikes are just for people out of practice. Israel Premier Tech pro riders used gravel bikes at this year's Paris-Roubaix, demonstrating that more relaxed geometry can still be fast, especially when the conditions are less than ideal.This confidence was particularly useful on the lane sections and twisty descents on the course, which often had a sprinkling of gravel and potholes.
This is particularly true if you’re not super flexible. It’s very easy to want to copy the pros who ride super aggressive race bikes, but most of them probably spend more hours in a week stretching than a lot of us do riding. Some of us may have been suckered into thinking that race bikes are loads quicker, possibly because the press releases for the latest and greatest speed machines always say"20 seconds faster at 40kph", and then another"1 minute faster at 40kph" for the next generation. While that might be true in a wind tunnel, in the real world, where gravel, corners, back pain and confidence exist, I don’t think so.
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