ENDURANCE BIKES HEAD-TO-HEAD

On an endurance bike you can attack the road all day without feeling beaten up at the end of it - we put three of the best through their paces

- Simon Smythe

Endurace bikes are all about long days in the saddle, so they have to combine speed and efficiency with comfort and enjoyment. How do they do that?

The geometry is the most obvious way of making a bike more comfortable and stable. Endurance bikes are higher at the front (stack) and the distance from the saddle to the head tube (reach) is shorter.

Some manufacturers will design their endurance frames with a slacker head angle for less twitchy steering but equally, you’ll find classic 73° ‘parallel’ endurance frames too.

Bottom bracket drop and chainstay length can also be tinkered with to tweak responsiveness to accelerations and steeper climbs.

Then there’s the frame material. Carbon-fibre is the perfect material for endurance bikes as the layup can be varied to build flex into certain areas of the frame, while stiffness can be bolstered in others.

As frame builders will tell you though, it’s more about what you do with the material than the material itself, so great endurance bikes can also be made from steel, aluminum, and titanium.

In this test, we have the Trek Domane SL 6 eTap to find out how it stacks up against the latest Giant Defy and the new Cannondale Synapse.

We’ve gone with a mid-range price point of around £4,000. For that price, you can expect a carbonfibre frame, in most cases an electronic groupset (though the Cannondale swaps in SmartSense lights and radar and specs mechanical Ultegra).

We would like to have included the Specialized Roubaix, the other big-brand endurance bike, but unfortunately, there isn’t one at the same price point.

Read on for our three-way battle of the endurance bikes.