Table of contents for June 2018 in Cycling Plus

FREE! VIFIT NUTRITION BUNDLE when you subscribe to Cycling Plus. See page 92 I like to think that I’m a good boss – understanding, empathetic and good humoured. Once a year, though, the Cycling Plus team no doubt think I’m an ogre as I force them to create our Bike Of The Year issue. The tech team, led by Warren Rossiter, has to test more bikes in three months than most of us will ride in our lifetimes, production editor Su has to sub-edit thousands and thousands of words of copy and the art team need to organise myriad photoshoots. But I think it’s worth being a horrible boss for a little while as Bike Of The Year, now in its 10th year, has become the go-to bike test for…

These make a particularly interesting test pair, perhaps lacking the glamour of certain brands or the ubiquity of Trek, Giant and Specialized, but this head-to-head is the perfect snapshot of £1000 road bikes. Okay, the B’Twin may cost less than £800, but its kit easily makes it the equal of more expensive bikes. Both B’Twin and Dolan know their way around the highest level of cycle sport. The French sports supermarket Decathlon uses the B’Twin name for its kit, but the moniker has also adorned pro team bikes ridden by AG2R and FDJ. Ormskirk’s Terry Dolan’s bikes have been ridden to more than 80 European and world track titles. So, both should be able to make a bike that’ll cope with the more modest power produced by the rest of…

With more float than a reclining otter, Scott’s £1899 Addict 30 Disc adds another facet to the Addict model’s almost all-encompassing ability, there are fast road, cyclo-cross and gravel versions, with designers putting endurance to the fore here. The lowest priced of the three Addict Disc models, this bike shares the same MF carbon frame and full carbon fork, but economises on componentry compared to its costlier stablemates. Similar cost compromises can be seen here in the £1900 entry into Roubaix ownership, being built from FACT 9r carbon, higher-spec bikes get FACT 10r or 11r for the Roubaix Pro and above. Numerically, the FACT 9r carbon used for the frame may sound lowly compared to the S-Works model, but it’s stiff, and efficient at transmitting rider inputs. Both the Scott…

£1449 Possibly the most refined bike model in cycling shows no signs of slowing down yet. Giant’s TCR has been the mainstay of the Taiwanese giant for over two decades. The carbon fibre TCRs come in four levels, each denoting lighter, stiffer material. This Advanced 2 is the second cheapest of the entry-level range, but it’s hardly slumming it in the spec stakes. A complete Shimano 105 compact groupset and Giant’s own tubeless alloy wheels, tyres, cockpit and saddle are all attractive and good quality. Shimano’s 105 is crisp shifting, good-looking and bombproof, and the compact chainset here doesn’t mean less speed, just more accessible gears from the 11-28 cassette. Lose the tubes Giant has taken the step of making its bikes tubeless, and supplying them with valves and sealant…

Ribble Aero 883 Disc £3199 Ribble has always had a deserved reputation for value for money. Historically, that meant very well-equipped bikes based around framesets sourced from overseas. Recently, Ribble has recruited talent from major brands, opened retail stores, and spent more time designing and developing its own framesets, such as this 883 Disc. What makes the 883 stand out is the equipment. Deda’s Superzero bar is one of the best aero-profile road bars around, the drop shape is compact yet comfortable. The almost complete Shimano Ultegra Di2 disc groupset would retail around £2000, and the 883 is running on Mavic’s latest Cosmic Pro carbon disc wheels (£1049). When you add all the components up, the 883 comes with over £3500 of equipment. We like the aggressive ride position and…

Perhaps in this 10th anniversary of Bike Of The Year there’s some poetic justice to the TCR taking the top spot. The TCR, in its Advanced 3 guise, was our very first Bike Of The Year winner, and the 2 won in 2013. In the intervening years the model has undergone numerous revisions, but you can still see some of that decade-old DNA in the 2018 iteration. The latest TCR is a process of evolution not revolution, Giant has tweaked the design with subtle improvements that add up to one of the most compelling, and wellpriced, bikes today. Giant should be applauded for its commitment to developing its own parts and wheelsets. Gone are the bland branded-up parts of old, replaced with highly competent, well-made and designed finishing kit. The…

We picked the last day of February to join Lost Lanes West author Jack Thurston on a ride exploring the quiet lanes and hidden byways of Wiltshire in the hope of encountering the first signs of spring, instead we’re huddled inside Bradford-on-Avon’s Lock Inn hiding from the fiercest blast of winter weather so far as the ‘Beast from the East’ battered at the hatches ahead of a week of snow. Jack is here to provide a masterclass in avoiding the same old busy roads and loops, and instead plot routes this summer to take in the roads and byways less travelled, to ignore ‘performance’ and revel in the simple pleasures of riding a bicycle. I’ve borrowed a Tifosi Cavazzo gravel bike from the Cycling Plus tech team for some of…

Here at Cycling Plus we take our testing seriously and have been putting road cycling products through their paces for 25 years. Our test team, led by senior technical editor Warren Rossiter, is the best in the business. They’ve got decades of cycling experience between them and know what makes a good – and bad – bike, accessory, gadget or garment. That means you can trust us to bring you honest assessments of every product we feature. If it gets our seal of approval then you can be sure that you’ll be bagging a great buy! FIRST RIDE First Ride sees our test team bring you their first impressions of the most exciting new bikes available. As soon as they’re out, we’re riding! ROAD TEST Before you buy a bike,…

1 The lowdown The problem with most headsets on o!-the-shelf bikes is that they’re chosen to hit the middle ground when it comes to bike "t. There’s been a trend for standard "t headsets to come with a cone-shaped top, which can add as much as 25mm to the stack height of your bike. If you want to go lower that means exposing the top bearing to the elements, vastly reducing its lifespan. 2 Slam that stem Slamming the front end may be more about fashion than "t, but we’ve de"nitely had bikes on which we’ve wanted to drop the stem further than the headset arrangement will allow. Cane Creek’s solution is to upgrade the top bearing and combine the top cover and compression ring into one, massively reducing the…

Iremember lying in a hospital bed, in 1996, recovering from my crash, knowing I would never walk again. Life’s uncertainties were compounded by my injuries and I was left wondering what was going to become of me. I first tried hand-cycling five years after the accident, but it wasn’t until 2008 that I bought my first bike, from eBay. Then, living in west London, it was difficult to navigate the busy, narrow roads. When I started, the position, so low on the road, felt vulnerable but you eliminate the risks with a mirror, lights and a flag, and as hand-bikes are unusual I think car drivers are more wary. After I moved to Aylesbury and began cycling on country lanes I discovered a passion for it. In 2011 a friend…

Bike Of The Year has turned 10 years old. In a decade of putting together the biggest road bike test, our methods haven’t changed. We research and choose a shortlist of bikes, this year we’ve got 40 over three key price points, plus eight women’s bikes. Our tech team tests each one over a gruelling four-month period, constantly assessing and whittling down the contenders, with our final five whisked off to Sanremo this year for photography, with help from Life Cycle Adventures and Sanremo Bike Resort. We’ve seen a trend towards wider rubber, more consideration for aerodynamics on comfortable, all-round bikes, and more comfort considerations on aero bikes. Some would have you believe that disc brakes are taking over, but our test has a 50/50 split between rim and discs,…

£980.29-£1099 Each of our final three in this price bracket come from online retailers, which suggests that at this price, at least, the internet really is your friend. You will need some hex keywielding competence to set them up, or ask a more mechanically minded friend, but all of our bikes came securely boxed and required the minimum of fettling. You turn the bar, tighten the stem and seatclamp bolts, but that was it – the gears and brakes ran accurately straight out of the box. As with the previous head-to-head this is also a microcosm of what £1000 will net you. There are two German aluminium bikes and an allcarbon bike from Blighty. Weightwise there’s little to choose between them, and if you can feel the 150g difference between…

When Trek says that the Domane offers “blistering speed” as well as “comfort and stability”, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this must be marketing hype, or that something would have to give, but you’d be wrong. Trek has accomplished the holy grail of endurance bikes with the Domane, demonstrating both compliance and power transfer in the frame, and phenomenal climbing ability. Trek’s IsoSpeed technology has been around for a while, offering a decoupling device that allows the carbon tubes to make tiny movements independent of each other. This innovation offers relief from bumps without resulting in a flexible, speed-sapping ride. The addition of IsoSpeed to the front of the bike is a stroke of genius, creating a road-smoothing ride while keeping the frame’s tubing stiff enough to transfer every…

£1900 Back in 2012, the original Domane’s rear IsoSpeed was a ride quality game changer, then along came front IsoSpeed to even up the bike’s overall ability. Now that technology has trickled down to Trek’s most affordable carbon fibre Domane, to give the SL 5 the same familial feel. The frameset is constructed with 500 Series carbon, one level down from Trek’s high-end Domanes, and the seat mast’s clever enclosing cap is alloy rather than carbon. But the groupset is all 105, with direct-mount brakes, and Bontrager provides everything else. Our bike’s 175mm head-tube plus 15mm tall headset top cap gave us a spacer-free, but still aggressive riding position, even though it’s Trek’s H2 relaxed front-end geometry. The Domane doesn’t scream endurance bike, as its shallow rims, plain profile and…

£3700 Whenever you’re looking at a bike range, there will always be one standout model. The one that the product manager pulled out all the stops on, not to create a superbike that only one per cent of bike buyers can own, but one that hits the balance between price and specification to create something that’s really desirable and attainable. In terms of Cannondale’s Evo range that superstar is this SuperSix Evo Dura-Ace. It’s got probably the best mechanical groupset to date in 9100 Dura-Ace; a system so slick and sharp it’s hard to believe it relies on cables. The Evo is also now capable of taking a wider range gear than before. Cannondale has deviated from full Dura-Ace by using its own Si chainset, which was designed to work…

£2999 The original Propel was one of the pioneers of the expanding aero-road bike genre. The new Propel Disc has the DNA of the original rimbrake bike but none of the tube shapes. If you want a rim-braked Propel for 2018, you’ll be getting the old-style frame. The new Propel is the result of three years of development, with Giant focusing on having the best weight ratio of any aero bike, and has been designed using Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and wind tunnel work to be adept in adverse wind conditions. Disc brakes and aero “When we started the project three years ago, the whole concept of an aero road bike with disc bikes was something we thought couldn’t be done,” says Andrew Juskaitis, Giant’s senior global product marketing manager.…

1 BUTTONS Two rubbery buttons on each side and one below the screen control setup and recording options 2 SCREEN The 56x39mm monochrome screen is clear and sharp with multiple data displays 3 MOUNTING The supplied out-front and bungee stem mounts hold the NeosTrack computer securely £149.99 > Giant GPS bargain THE HANDLEBAR-MOUNTED GPS UNIT market is dominated by Garmin, but there are alternatives. One of the newest is Giant’s 78g NeosTrack, which boasts a large 56x39mm monochrome screen, ANT+, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity, and battery life that’s claimed to last as long as 33 hours. So far we have no reason to doubt that claim because, despite using the NeosTrack on every ride possible lately, it’s still showing over 50 per cent charge! All its functions are accessed via…

Imagine the scene: the sun is shining and the birds are singing. You’re riding at a perfect pace – not too slow that you’re burning carbs, not too fast so you can take in the scenery around you. Your freshly shaved legs are looking good in perfectly-fitting shorts and your tan lines are maturing nicely. You chat with fellow riders, who are great company. Other road users respectfully keep their distance. The only thing on your mind is what to order at the café beyond the next rewardingly challenging incline. Too good to be true? Not necessarily. Here is our guide to what you need for the perfect ride, every time… The Perfect Bike Perfection… The ultimate marriage of rider and machine, as if the bike is an extension of…

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Recalling his close defeat to Michał Kwiatkowski in last year’s Milan-Sanremo, in the build up to the most recent edition, cycling’s perennial showman Peter Sagan reckoned he wouldn’t have been happy if he’d have won in the same way. In a three-man break with Julian Alaphilippe, the Pole largely sat on Sagan’s wheel, jumping him at the last. It was canny racing - Kwiatkowski knew, all things being equal, he wouldn’t have a hope in a straight sprint with the Slovak, so he gambled that Sagan would do the work to keep ahead of the peloton. He was prepared to lose in order to win. “If you analyse how Kwiatkowski won last year, then… If I win like that, I wouldn’t be happy with my performance,” said Sagan. “I prefer…

With Britain’s most extensive urban cycle-path network – the Redway, many going through parkland and lakes – Milton Keynes is great for family-friendly, car-free leisure rides. Road cycling thrives in the gentle Bucks countryside too. With excellent train and car access, friendly local pubs and all-budget accommodation options, Milton Keynes is a pleasant cycling surprise. ROUTE ONE Canal country 65 miles Heart of England countryside Sample a morning coffee at Salcey Forest, then follow the quiet country roads through canalside villages. Ride through the gently rolling hills to join NCN50 to pass Stowe’s grand arch to Buckingham, where you’ll find a choice of pubs and cafés. Tiny back lanes and the characterful old Watling Street see you return to Milton Keynes. Get the route: tinyurl.com/cplus-miltonheart ROUTE TWO Bucks fizz 58 miles…

£1899.99 At this price, carbon frames are essentially a de-tuned version of each brand’s lustworthy range-topper, so you get hints of the performance and character, but know there could be so much more. The CAAD12, our 2016 Bike Of The Year, however, is the most refined aluminium frame, from a company who made its name with cutting-edge alu-tubed wizardry. Eye for detail It’s easy to spend some time taking in the CAAD12 frame’s details, from the purposefully sculpted tubes to the chunky welds and heavily cowled rear dropouts. All cables are routed internally, with the rear mech cable popping out at the rear of the cowled dropout. The down-tube morphs from vertically flared at the headtube to fully cover the wide BB30 bottom bracket shell, alongside the flattened pyramid shape…

£3500 The new Tarmac replaces the curvy SL5 with a much more angular design, with slimmer tube profiles and dropped seatstays. The new frame has lost some serious weight too, with the S-Works version now 733g, over 200g lighter than the SL5 S-Works. Our test model is the next rung on the ladder down from the S-Works FACT 10r carbon frame, weighing a still-light 950g. A new, super-light (sub-300g) fork is designed to be size specific, so the steerer tube profile changes across the range to ensure consistent handling whether you’re 5ft 6in or 6ft 5in. Specialized has done a similar job with the Tarmac frame, if you look at the down-tube dimensions between smallest and largest sizes you’ll see a significant difference. The frame comes with a Shimano Ultegra…

£310.99 › Give your bike a second wind… A PERENNIAL BUDGET favourite, Campagnolo’s Scirocco aluminium wheelset returns with a redesigned rim. They’re 35mm tall, but in line with the shift to wider road tyres, are 22.5mm wide externally and 17mm internally. The Sciroccos are rim brake only, and their C17 rim bed design improves strength, and makes for a better interface with 25mm and 28mm tyres, reducing the turbulence caused by poorly matched tyres and rims. The rims are balanced to equalise the rotational mass of the valve using Campagnolo’s Dynamic Balance process, their joints are welded for integrity and the braking track is milled smooth for smoother, more efficient stopping. Campagnolo’s aluminium hub bodies feature aluminium axles and steel cup and cone bearings, with external lock rings to adjust…

One school of thought is that brown or complex carbohydrates are good and white or simple carbs are bad. But ultimately, it’s all about context, both have their place in the diet. What is more important is the timing in which we have them and the foods we have them with. The benefits The Glycaemic Index (GI) is measured on a scale of 1-100, where 100 is glucose (fastest releasing), with complex carbs typically scoring lower. A rating of 1-50 is low, 51-70 medium and 71-100 is high. Low to moderate GI carbohydrate is ideal to have most of the time, in particular that two to four-hour period before training for the steady rise in blood sugar. It also tends to be higher in fibre and micronutrients. This means you…

FAT FIGURES 1629 CALORIES BURNED A 45-year-old, 81kg male cycling for two hours at an average of 18mph is equivalent to a JD Wetherspoon large breakfast – two sausages, bacon, two fried eggs, beans, hash browns, mushrooms, tomato and toast NOW 18st 2lb (115kg) THEN 24st 9lb (156kg) WHAT WAS YOUR LIFE LIKE BEFORE THE BIKE? I’ve had a weight issue since I was a child. I tried various diets with no success. A cancer diagnosis and emergency surgery were complicated by my weight too. HOW DID YOUR DIET CHANGE? It took me a year to get back to normal after surgery, during which time I saw a picture of myself that horrified me and made me determined to change. HOW DID CYCLING HELP? In two years since I bought…