On Gravel.

The first proper gravel bike I had a go on, at a Cannock Chase bike test day in April 2019, was a quite spectacular thing. As well it should be - the Titici F-GR01 came with a price tag somewhere north of double that of Canyon’s Grail CF SL which I rode immediately afterwards. The Grail is highly regarded as a gravel bike, but the plushness of the Titici in a back-to-back test was otherworldly. All of which is unimportant, because I came away from the day convinced that over any of the trails I rode the gravel bikes on, I would have had far more fun on a hardtail mountain bike.

Fast forward a couple of years and here I am, waiting for my new gravel bike to arrive. Complete change of heart? Not exactly.

So convinced was my riding buddy of the gravel appeal, he bought himself a Forme Monsal 1 - a stylish carbon number with a SRAM Force 1x drivetrain. On road rides, the gearing is a touch too low, forcing a higher cadence or a more relaxed cruising pace. Off road, where the gearing is more appropriate, there’s still a need for him to pick lines and pay attention, a fact which is all the more obvious if I’m on my hardtail, crashing over roots and rocks with careless abandon. The place where his gravel bike makes perfect sense is on our local canal paths; hard packed and mostly well maintained, but a surface that’s in no way suited to 25mm road tyres. Here, the gravel bike could carry more speed than a knobbly-tyred hardtail or a fragile road bike.

The canals make up a fair proportion of my rides, but usually on the way to muddier MTB trails. For a gravel bike to be useful, those canals would need to be secondary, not to the muddier end of the spectrum, but to the dirty winter roads that I’d rather not expose my De Rosa to. It would need to allow me to treat it like a road bike - and to keep up with club rides - but with the option of a diversion along canals and across the occasional field. It would also need to be practical enough to carry kit for bike adventures - if not a full wilderness bikepacking setup, at the very least some bags to enable cycling to work.

During the same timeframe, Shimano released GRX, it’s first gravel-specific groupset. Available in three spec levels, the top - GRX810 - is Ultegra-level and in 2x format, offers a broad spread of gears, with its derailleurs spaced further from the frame to enable wider tyre choices. This seemed the perfect option so I set about formulating a spec and trying to order a bike…