The Slow Domestique

‘What a weapon’ was my first thought after letting the bike rip on some local trails. Light, responsive, stable and smooth sharp steering, my new weapon of choice for nailing some fast single track.

I’ve had a week to scrutinise the Crossbow on the trails and up close and personal. Starting with the basics the frame is fairly standard Taiwanese Alloy with functional welds particularly round the BB shell. Not sure of the frame weight but the bike builds up too 9.5kg so it must have reasonable starting point. The geometry is trad cross with a high bottom bracket, good clearance for mud means the chainstays are an inch longer than on my tight framed Allez but the shorter top tube brings the front closer to give a nice short snappy handling wheelbase. And toe overlap, but no more than on any other race bike I’ve ridden.The paint is well laid down it seems, nice rich metallic in the dark blue sections, I still would have preferred the pimp white color scheme but thats only available on the 105 spec model now.

This is the Tiagra spec model so you get both front and rear mech and shifters from the groupset, the rear mech looks very similar to the four year old Ultegra mech on my Allez. The Tiagra hoods were initially odd but felt comfortable quickly, cockpit feels high but in a good way. Bars and stem both stiff and functional Oval with comfortable anatomoic bend on the drops. The stem is untrimmed as yet so will play around with it for a while.  Brakes are 4ZA and have bedded in nicely, not had any wet weather yet to truely test them. The crankset is an other pleasent deviation from the Shimano groupset, the FSA Gosamer compact is good-looking and performs well paired with it’s matching BB. No hint of flex or ghost shifting and the heavily machined chainrings shift up and down well. Moving back the Oval seatpost and Sele San Marco saddle just work, no fuss no drama and look good to boot.

Now the wheels and tyres seem light and strong, but I will reserve judgement till I’ve a few hundred miles on them as I have some reservations.. The Shimano R500 wheelset looks atractive and the hubs are smooth but I’m slightly concerned on running a front radial wheel on a cross bike? Don’t get me wrong I love radial wheels on the road, but off road? We will see. The Vittoria cross tyres can take high presure for road use and you don’t get a lot of tread block movement, so rarely squirrelly. Not had any dirt miles in anger so I’m interested to see how they perform.

So as an overall package, there is nothing I would want to change. Everything works well together, whether putting the power down hard in the traffic light sprint, bombing down a country lane on loose gravel. it just feels planted, super responsive (in acceleration and steering) and comfortable.

So I’m a happy camper. Will have an other review in a few months once I’ve laid some serious mileage on this baby, which I will do with pleasure.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, March 19th, 2009 at 8:53 pm and is filed under Bicycles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.