Innholdsfortegnelse for September 2025 i Cyclist

It’s climbs like these that give the race its flavour. What would the Tour be without the iconic peaks of the Alps and Pyrenees, complete with soaring switchbacks, vertiginous cliffs, crowds of screaming fans pressing into the road, painted names on the tarmac, flags, flares, mankinis…? You don’t get that on a time-trial stage. Since Cyclist launched in 2012 we have visited, celebrated and sweated on the greatest European climbs to grace the pro sport. This issue is no exception. We’ve got perhaps the toughest climb ever to appear at the Vuelta a España, the Alto de l’Angliru (p56), and the tightly coiled hairpins of the Lacets de Montvernier in France, which first appeared at the Tour in 2015 (p78). It’s just a shame that Britain doesn’t have any climbs…

British titanium bike builder J.Laverack spent four years collaborating with car manufacturer Aston Martin on a project called the .1R. The result was a ground-breaking bike combining carbon composite with 3D printed titanium, which Cyclist featured last year in issue 151. But according to J.Laverack, it was what that project taught them that was as important as what it produced. ‘It gave us an insight into the capabilities of additive manufacturing [3D printing] and how it could be applied to bicycle design,’ says founder Oli Laverack. ‘The big advantage being that we are not constrained in the same ways you are when designing bicycles using tubes and CNC-machined parts. Additive manufacturing allows you to create complex and intricate shapes that would be cost-prohibitive or technically impossible to achieve with traditional…

1 Road Captain by Luke Rowe £22, penguin.co.uk Did you hear the inventor of wind chill died? He was 86 but felt like 75. Did you hear Luke Rowe has a book out? It’s called Road Captain and is focussed on just that – the life of a road captain in cycling’s biggest races. Rowe gives the inside view on race day tactics and decision making in a perennial Tour de France winning team and packs in plenty of stories from his racing career. 2 Continental Archetype tyres £95 each, continental-tires.com Prince liked most letters, but nothing compares to U. And nothing compares to Archetype tyres, it seems. Developed alongside UAE Team Emirates XRG, Continental says they’re 35g lighter than its GP5000 S TRs (claimed 275g), making them its ‘lightest…

‘What a fantastic climb that the Tour de France has decided to include this year. Les Montvernier, 17 corners, it took no less than six years to build. They started building it in 1928 and finished it in 1934.’ It’s classic stuff from the late, great Paul Sherwen, part Tour de France Bible, the huge almanac given to teams and commentators that details everything from sign-on times to which order of monks lived in what abbey; part unfiltered and impassioned response to the pictures being beamed from Le Tour’s helicopter. This is perhaps the shortest Cat 2 climb in Tour history. It’s hard to think of a road with a higher hairpin-to-metre ratio As Romain Bardet stormed up the early slopes to an eventual stage win, countless viewers wondered why…

For one morning each April, the birds of Mallorca have to swallow an annual dose of their own medicine. At an ungodly hour, for once it’s them being woken against their will by thousands of freehubs buzzing through the night, heading towards the start line of the island’s long-running sportive, the Mallorca 312. The day will later see sunshine and blue skies, but as we stand waiting in the start pen, rain is lashing down and I can’t help but sympathise with the group of five stick-thin Spanish lads in skinsuits next to me who are huddled together in the dark for warmth like aerodynamic penguins. An hour rolls by and, just as the heavens are running out of rain, the sodden mass of humanoid bike centaurs starts to move.…

Sram’s new Force AXS road groupset has borrowed some of the clothes of its older sibling Red AXS while adding a few neat touches of its own. Measured against Force’s previous update in 2023, which mostly just changed the look, the upgrades this time are wide-ranging and include improved braking, shifting and wireless integration. ‘We wanted to focus on braking, expanding Red’s performance down to Force and Rival, as well as reducing weight,’ says Dan Stefiuk, Sram’s road product manager. ‘This has been achieved via a new shape for the carbon crank arm, a forged carbon pulley cage, an updated rear derailleur shape and a new profile for the levers.’ These weight savings amount to a 183g drop in the 2x Force AXS groupset with spider-based power meter (as seen…

‘Akid-sized, bright pink Peugeot with drop bars,’ Kev Pollock says fondly as he recalls his first bike. ‘I must have been about seven. I’d seen it in the window of a local shop. We had no money growing up but my mum managed to buy it for me one Christmas, paying it off over months through one of those old Christmas Clubs shops used to run. That’s always stayed with me. I was totally smitten.’ He didn’t know it back then, but that pink Peugeot foreshadowed a life on two wheels. Pollock remembers building dodgy BMX ramps as a teen, weekend mountain bike trips to Glentress in his twenties and cruising on slicks after university. He is now an artist and furniture designer, but bikes have been a constant. ‘These…

In the closing years of the last millennium, Vuelta a España director Enrique Franco was searching for a spectacle to help his race compete with its more famous French and Italian rivals. He believed the race needed a climb that was even more ferocious than the likes of the Stelvio, Mont Ventoux or the Mortirolo – something to strike fear into riders and stir excitement among fans. How Franco came to find his climb is somewhat shrouded in mystery, but the most popular belief is that a cycling fan called Miguel Prieto Randino wrote to the race’s organisers in 1997 to tell them about ‘a mountain in Asturias, in the heart of the Sierra del Aramo… about 15km from Oviedo, whose road is barely marked on maps as it is…

The standard custom framebuilder script reads: enigmatic artisan craftsperson (often with beard) hones skills over many years, working with dusty tools and traditional materials (usually steel) and fabricating frames in a time-honoured way (mainly TIG welded or brazed). When Bastion came onto the scene in 2015, it tore that script to shreds. Bastion’s script goes: three development engineers, no more than a year after leaving their previous employment in a different industry, start making frames from 3D printed titanium and carbon composite, building them using micro-laser welding and filament looms. Unsurprisingly, the bikes that come out of this approach are unlike anything else on the market. ‘In 2014 my two co-founders and I were all development engineers for Toyota,’ says co-CEO Ben Schultz. ‘At that time the automotive industry lost…

‘Hey, why has your bike only got one leg?’ It’s a question I was asked on more than one occasion while testing the Topstone Carbon Lefty, usually while standing at traffic lights. The time I had while waiting for the light to turn green was always insufficient to explain how Cannondale had developed a way of including the spring and damping oil in a single unit while using needle bearings instead of bushings in a very precise way to ensure a smooth movement of the suspension without twisting under load, so I usually just said something facetious like, ‘I lost the other leg in an accident, but it seems to work fine.’ At other times, when I could sense the lights were about to change, I’d resort to the more…

In a way, the Aspect Integrale is Mason’s most important bike to date. Not from a performance perspective – the company has a range of ten bikes that all hold their own in specific niches – but in terms of what the model represents. It’s a direct link to Mason’s original bikes, expressed in the most contemporary way. ‘Mason started with the steel Resolution and aluminium Definition road bikes,’ says founder Dom Mason. ‘Then, using titanium meant we could achieve the ride quality and feel of steel but at a lower weight than our aluminium frames. We’d done it successfully in the BokehTi – the titanium version of our Bokeh gravel bike – so we were keen to apply the same concept to a road frame. Titanium comes with an…

Around 60km remained on Stage 11 of the 1985 Tour de France when Bernard Hinault decided to go to the front of the race. Hinault, who had taken yellow three days earlier after winning the 75km time-trial into Strasbourg by more than two minutes, was seeking his fifth Tour title and was determined to increase his overall lead as the high mountains loomed. The 195km stage took the peloton from Pontarlier to Morzine-Avoriaz, taking in three major climbs over the final 75km. It was on the slopes of the first, the 1,330m Pas de Morgins, that Hinault made his move, steadily building a gap on those behind. With him was a young rider from Fusagasugá in Colombia. Luis ‘Lucho’ Herrera, leader of the newly minted Café de Colombia team, was…

When Marion Rousse stood up to speak at the UCI’s headquarters in Aigle at the start of June, it was a landmark moment. The director of the women’s Tour de France, or the ‘Femmes’, was revealing new standalone dates in 2026 for the reborn race, dates that hammered home the explosive growth in women’s racing. That’s because in 2026, the Tour de France Femmes will not piggyback the men’s Tour, the Olympic Games or anything else. It will be its own event and no longer riding on the coattails of the men’s peloton, an achievement that has taken just four years, during which sponsors, TV rights holders and the wider sports audience have all embraced the Femmes. Understandably, Rousse was jubilant. ‘We no longer need men for the Tour de…

Lachlan Morton is a hard man to tie down. The Australian rider began his career in traditional fashion, leaving home to race in Europe and America, building a palmarès that included victory at the Tour of Utah in 2016 and appearances at the Vuelta a España and Giro d’Italia. However, the pro race scene didn’t really suit him. Morton was happier taking on less formal but more gruelling solo challenges that captured the imagination and built a loyal following of fans. His team, EF Education-EasyPost, was quick to spot the value of this so released Morton from standard racing duties to concoct a calendar of gravel races, ultra-endurance events and record attempts that it called Far Beyond. Morton found himself flying around the world, pursuing an intense schedule of challenges…

They say it’s the height of vanity to go reading through your old bike reviews, but I couldn’t help but go searching for the last time I rode a Wilier, and it was a whole nine years ago. And what a difference nine years makes. Governments have fallen, borders have been redrawn, and as a species our brightest and best spent time putting Katy Perry in Space. And then there’s the bikes. How does the Wilier Cento10 Air I tested in 2016 compare to the Cento family’s successor, the Filante? Well, fairly favourably. That bike had one-piece bars and partially hidden cables because, yes, that bike had rim brakes. It cost £4,999 in Ultegra spec, weighed 7.51kg and tyre width was a progressive 28mm. But most favourably of all, it…

Four years ago, when the original Oakley Kato wraparound sunglasses first appeared, they looked radical and, well… weird. But in that time they’ve slowly been assimilated into cycling culture. Maybe it was thanks to the sprinting success of Mark Cavendish, Jasper Philipsen and co; maybe it was the similar designs that emerged from other brands such as 100%, Scicon and Rapha; maybe it was the promotion by football megastar Kylian Mbappé. Whatever it was, they’ve become almost normal. So Oakley decided to rock the boat again. The new Velo Kato glasses are quite literally bigger and better. Unlike the original, this version has been designed specifically for cycling. With that aim, Oakley decided it needed an even bigger field of vision and better performance in the wind than before, and…