The winter bike is dead… long live the winter bike. Before you dash to the shed to check up on your own winter machine (in whatever form it takes), rest assured all is well. Whether your own winter machine is the traditional inexpensive road bike with mudguards (fenders if you like), or a gravel steed, or anything in-between, it remains as valid as it ever did.
But over the past six or seven years winter bikes, along with the entire landscape of cycling, have changed. Traditionally – by which I mean up to around 10 years ago – if you had a dedicated winter bike it was generally used for training during the kind of weather that’d eventually ruin your ‘best’ road machine, the one you may well also have used for racing.
But disc brakes took off and altered frame design – and that was followed by Covid and gravel bikes, and things are no longer the same.
“You’ve got your new carbon road bike with disc brakes and carbon wheels, and you’ve spent money on it,” Manning adds, “and then you’re looking at your old pride and joy – your carbon rim-brake bike with skinny wheels. And it really wasn’t ideal for a winter bike. It just kind of scuppered it a bit. And then along came gravel bikes.”
A gravel bike but no ‘gravel’
At the outset of the gravel boom there weren’t many people, whether in the industry or the riders themselves, who knew what to do with these new, fat-tyred machines. As with so many things, they arrived in the UK from across the pond, born out of a gravel scene featuring miles and miles of die-straight dusty tracks. Of which there were almost none in the UK.
While people were busy working out what gravel riding was going to look like if you didn’t live in Kansas, they quickly set about doing the one thing they were immediately good at – winter riding. One quirk of UK life is that wherever you live, you tend to believe the potholes on your local roads are worse than anyone else’s. But with the advent of gravel bikes and tyres that, even from the very start, were as wide as 40mm, we finally had a little less to complain about.
“Gravel bikes made a very nice winter bike,” Manning says. “And a lot of people, myself included, bought a gravel bike [on the basis that] ‘this is easy to justify. I can use it as my winter bike’. And then in the summer, you put your gravel tyres on, you’ve got your gravel bike. Going back to eight or nine years ago, when gravel first came to the market, a lot of gravel bikes were sold in that way.”
UK brand Ribble has been especially close to the changes that have taken place over the years. With rim brakes, mudguards and a barely-there pricetag by modern stages, Ribble‘s popular ‘Audax‘ model made the perfect winter bike and was used as such by many. But its old-school design has since been eclipsed.
Commercial and marketing director David Stacey says: “Today, rising costs and changing riding habits mean fewer riders want multiple bikes. At the same time, the growth of gravel riding has reshaped what a winter bike looks like. Wider tyres, stability, comfort and clearance suit rough winter roads just as well as bridleways.”
Ribble’s newer ‘CGR’ models (Cross, Gravel, Road), are designed to do it all, and are broadly the replacement for its Audax of old, says Stacey. “Models like the Ribble CGR are the modern Audax. We designed this to be as good on gravel as it is on winter roads – we wanted it to be the perfect year round bike.”
N+1 or ‘one bike to rule them all’?
It felt almost as if these new, do-it-all machines had been sent from above to meet the demands of one side of a paradox that drives so many cyclists and become ‘the only bike you’ll ever need’. The other half of this, of course, is the n+1 theory – the idea that no matter how many bikes you own, there will always be room for another.
This is the more enjoyable half of the equation and the one that nearly all of us prefer. Ergo, the advent of gravel bikes has not suddenly put the brakes on our buying habits, but for many of us they do remain a well-used year-round option.
Versatile they may be, but gravel bikes don’t offer the perfect solution for everyone. Plenty of riders, especially those who race, are still opting for something that looks more traditional. The main differences though, are still fatter tyres and disc brakes.
Manning adds: “I think a winter bike in the true sense of the word does need to be two-by [a double chainset]. It needs to have that classic 50/34, 11-30, 11-32, cassette on it, and it needs to be capable of a punchy club winter club ride. And you don’t get that on a gravel bike, so you need to be looking at the more crossover endurance bikes that are gravel capable.”
It’s clear there is still room for that more traditional machine, depending on the type of riding you do. But winter riding itself has changed a great deal in the past 10 years – and not just because of gravel bikes.
Many riders now do a lot of riding indoors in the winter months; indeed some may barely venture outside at all. Platforms like Zwift and MyWhoosh make indoor training more appealing than ever before, and allow high levels of fitness to be maintained in the comfort of our sheds, garages and even living rooms. This acts as another nail in the coffin for the traditional winter bike, as a fun ride off-road at the weekend can perfectly compliment a diet of midweek intervals on the indoor trainer.
Cycling changes constantly of course, and the ‘traditional’ winter bikes mentioned here were once thoroughly modern next to the fixed gear machines popular in the mid-20th century. What comes after gravel machines, who knows?
