Posts

Can a hardtail make a good gravel bike? I had a Cannondale Scalpel HT Hi-Mod frame collecting dust, so I stopped wondering and built one. It now has a rigid carbon fork, drop bars, SRAM Rival XPLR AXS, and Garbaruk’s new 13-speed cassette with a 10-52 spread. On 2.25-inch tires, with pedals, it weighs 18 lb 7 oz (8.36 kg). That number surprised me. This isn’t a Red build or a weight-weenie parts list. It’s a mid-tier group on a mountain bike frame I bought cheap, and it lands right where most stock carbon gravel bikes do. ...

That’s my old Crux leaning on a fence post in the photo up top — no aero tube shaping, no wind tunnel time, not even the current generation of the bike. And I had a great day on it. I just finished writing up the new Canyon Grail, and buried in the press materials was a stat that stuck with me more than the tire clearance number did: Canyon tested the bike in a wind tunnel with a pedaling mannequin, simulating yaw angles up to 20 degrees, to chase watts at a race pace of 35 km/h. That’s a genuinely sophisticated piece of engineering. It’s also a lot of institutional effort spent on a question I’m not sure enough people are asking: faster toward what? ...

We’d been watching this bike show up in the wild for months — a Traka 360 start line here, a blurry Eurobike hallway shot there — and today Canyon finally made it official. The third-generation Grail is out, and the headline change is the one every gravel racer with wide tires and a dream has been asking for: clearance jumped from 42mm to 57mm, enough for a 2.25-inch mountain bike tire if you want to run one. That’s not a trim update. That’s Canyon admitting the second-gen Grail was already outgunned by where gravel racing actually went. ...

The knock on running 1x on a road bike is always the same two things: you lose range, and you get big gaps between gears. It’s why most people never seriously consider dropping the front derailleur on the road. When I built up my SuperSix Evo with SRAM’s 13-speed Force XPLR group, I wanted to stop guessing and put real numbers to both claims. Neither one held up the way I expected. ...

I put a gravel drivetrain on a road race bike: one chainring, 13 gears, no front shifting. The whole reason I wanted to build a 2026 Cannondale SuperSix Evo Gen 5 this way was to answer a single question — what do you actually give up going 1x on the road? Going in I assumed the answer was “a lot.” It turned out to be a lot less than I expected. ...

In my last post about switching to SRAM Force E1, I compared the setups I’m considering using range percentages — 494% for the 2x, 460% for XPLR, and so on. Range is the number every manufacturer prints on the box, and it’s also the least useful number for deciding what to actually ride. Two drivetrains with identical range can feel completely different, because range tells you nothing about where the gears sit between the extremes. ...

This is part two of my Stumpjumper 15 Alloy build series. If you missed the setup — why I picked an alloy frame on sale over a carbon build, and why reliability has mattered more to me than ever since a Cannondale carbon frame broke on me — start with part one. This post covers the single biggest change I made to how the bike actually rides: swapping the stock shock link for a Cascade Components 156mm mullet link. ...

If you’ve been watching professional racing over the last few years, you’ve probably noticed more riders lining up to flat stages with a single chainring up front. Jonas Vingegaard has made it almost a signature — swapping to a 1x setup on stages where the terrain doesn’t demand the range of a full 2x drivetrain. The question worth asking is what those setups actually look like, why pros can get away with them, and whether any of that translates to the rest of us. ...

Every build starts with a question, and mine was blunt: could I put together a trail bike I’d actually trust on the descents, keep running for years, and not spend carbon-flagship money to get there? This series is the long answer, broken out from the full build video below into a few focused posts — I’ll walk through the suspension, the drivetrain, the routing that nearly broke me, and the final setup and weight. But before any of that, it’s worth explaining why I landed on this frame at all. Parts come and go. The frame is the one decision everything else has to live with. ...

Three weeks ago we walked through the leaked images of a new Tarmac and made the case that Specialized wasn’t about to blow up a proven formula. That call held up. The S-Works Tarmac SL9 is now official, and it’s exactly the kind of update the leaks suggested: real, measurable, and nowhere near as dramatic as the marketing copy wants it to sound. The headline numbers Specialized is calling the SL9 the fastest road bike it has ever built, and the case rests on three figures: a claimed frame weight of 687 grams, complete builds as light as 6.5 kg, and a 4-watt aerodynamic saving over the outgoing SL8 at 45 km/h in the wind tunnel. A dedicated Alpinist climbing build reportedly comes in at 6.1 kg. None of that is a leap. The frame is actually 2 grams heavier than the SL8’s, and 4 watts at 45 km/h is a number that matters mostly to WorldTour sprinters and time trial specialists chasing marginal gains, not to the rest of us. ...