Kona Ouroboros CR/DL

£3,499 Past meets present on Kona's ambitious, genre-blurring adventure platform

- Oscar Huckle

The Ouroboros is a new model in Kona's gravel bike lineup, designed to push the genre's boundaries. Its name comes from the ancient symbol of a serpent eating its own tail in a cyclical, continually evolving process. This represents how the brand aren't trying to reinvent the gravel or cross-country mountain bike, but are paying tribute to both disciplines.

It took me a while to fully understand this bike, but I came away impressed, despite some obvious flaws. It's a shame this mid-range model is draped in some so-so kit.

This bike is certainly distinctive in its appearance, with its stout head tube and beefy seat tube junction the first things your eyes are drawn to. It looks to me like a Salsa Cutthroat crossed with the dropped rear-end of a Yeti ARC. Kona claim a 1,942g weight for the carbon fibre frameset, in the 52cm size, with the fork coming in at 312g (both painted, with hardware, including thru-axles). The brand don't delve much into the carbon construction of the Ouroboros beyond the layup being optimised for "strength, durability and [optimal] ride quality".

Although this CR/DL model wears a rigid carbon fork, the Ouroboros's front end is corrected for a gravel suspension fork, with a 420mm axle-to-crown measurement. Most gravel suspension forks have 40mm of travel, although RockShox's recently announced Rudy XL has 60mm. But some brands, such as Ridley and Lee Cougan, go the whole hog and spec a 100mm mountain bike fork, on their Ignite GTX and Innova Super Gravel models, respectively. Kona say they didn't opt for a longer-travel fork because they wanted the geometry and spec to be "tailored to fast, capable performance without fully drifting into mountain biking territory".