Factor One aero road bike first ride review

Approaching the new Factor One aero road bike at the launch event in Girona I had the same sense of trepidation that I imagine jockeys feel when being introduced to a racehorse for the first time. That feeling of: ‘What is this thing going to do to me?’

It just looks so aggressive. The near vertical seat tube and fork legs, and the way the bars sit out ahead of the incredibly deep head tube, make the bike look like it’s leaning forward into the road, straining to get off the leash. 

The bow legs of the fork give it the impression of a track bike more than a road bike, and it’s all so relentlessly aero that my initial assumption was that rideability would be sacrificed at the altar of straight-line speed.

Related questions you can explore with Ask Cyclist, our AI search engine.If you would like to ask your own question you just need to , or subscribe.

Turns out I was wrong. The Factor One is most definitely a fast bike, but the first thing that struck me when taking it for a test ride was just how ‘normal’ it felt. Despite looking nothing like my usual setup, the position was immediately familiar, and the sensation was of a well-mannered, easy-to-handle road bike, and not the bucking bronco that I was expecting.

The reason for this is that Factor’s engineers put a lot of time into creating a geometry that balances a safe, stable platform with the desire of modern pro riders to get into an aggressive, forward-leaning position.

As Rob Gitelis, owner of Factor, puts it, ‘Stems were getting way too long on traditional aero road bikes. With the advent of big tyres and 165mm cranks, centre of gravity was getting all out of whack from where it should be. So those were the things we wanted to address with this bike.’

Playing the angles

At the launch presentation for the Factor One, chief engineer Graham Shrive whizzed through the new bike’s aerodynamic credentials in about four slides. Lessons learned from the Ostro VAM and Hanzõ track bike… Changes to UCI rules on frame dimensions… 140 iterations in CFD… Weeks spent sleeping on the floors of wind-tunnels… Rider feedback… Yadda, yadda, yadda… ‘World’s fastest UCI-legal road bike’.

His hurry was so that he could then spend the next 40-or-so slides explaining the complexities of the geometry of the bike. For the specifics, read our launch article here, but the basic thinking is that current trends for shorter cranks, wider tyres, slammed forward saddles, narrow bars and super-long stems are making race bikes unbalanced, and so the One aims to address this.

It does so partly by dropping the bottom bracket, steepening the seat tube and stretching out the front end so that racers can have their aggressive ride position but still have their centre of gravity in the right place to ensure stable handling and prevent crashes from flipping over the handlebars.

That sense of balance was evident during the first ride I took on the bike. Despite having a very high saddle position (the curse of long legs) I still felt ‘in’ the bike, rather than perched on top of it, as is often the case with test bikes. The wheelbase is reasonably long – 1,020mm for a size 58 – so the bike felt stable in a straight line, while the 57.5mm trail kept steering as nimble as you’d expect from a race bike.  

Most excitingly from my perspective, the stretched-out front end meant there was absolutely no toe overlap with the front wheel. It may seem like a minor thing, but for those of us blessed with feet like canoes it’s a genuine issue and made a real difference to my enjoyment of the bike.

As for speed, I have no comparative data to assess how well I did on the out-and-back time-trial circuit near Girona where we tested the One, but it’s safe to say: yes, it’s fast. We can aim to get a more precise idea of how fast when we get hold of a model for a full test in the coming weeks.

Similarly with comfort. The test rides were too short and the roads of Girona too smooth to get a real sense of how I might feel after several hours on Britain’s blistered tarmac, but my initial thoughts were that the One was more comfortable, and the position more sustainable, than I had imagined prior to the test.

Are you one for the One?

Factor is pitching the One as a ‘leadout’ bike or ‘breakaway’ bike. These days, a lot of races are won by riders pushing off the front of the pack and soloing to victory, and the idea is that if a team can calculate how long rider A can sustain power B over distance C then they can work out the exact moment to go for the break. And if the One can help rider A sustain a higher speed at power B, then he or she will have a better chance of winning the race.

As Shrive puts it, ‘The rider’s job is to win the race. Our job is to help the rider win the race.’

And if Factor’s claim to be the ‘world’s fastest UCI-legal road bike’ holds true, it makes a very strong case to for a rider to invest in the One. If you’re racing.

If you’re not racing, the incentive is not as strong, especially when the cheapest version comes in at £10,899 for Shimano Ultegra and goes up to £12,899 for SRAM Red. But that doesn’t completely discount the One for everyday riders.

For starters, there’s the looks. To my eye, the Factor One is a striking, dramatic bike that makes most other road bikes look pedestrian by comparison. It doesn’t hurt that Factor has come up with some pretty funky paintjobs for the One as well. I liked the grey/green of my test bike, but given the choice I’d go for the pink and yellow ‘blush’ colour – no point being subtle with a bike like this.

And then there’s the speed. The Factor One is built to serve the specific needs of WorldTour racers, but you don’t have to be a pro racer to want to go fast. 

The One is a bike that will turn heads and smash PBs (brand director David Millar already claims to have got the fastest time of the year on one of his local segments aboard a One that wasn’t even set up for him). It’s just a shame that until Factor finds a new WorldTour team to sponsor, we won’t see the bike racing at the top level for a while.

Perhaps that’s all the more reason to get one now – you’ll be one of the only Ones out there.