Raleigh

Roker Sport Complete Bike - 2016

For years now, we've been treating (or mistreating, rather) our road bikes like gravel bikes. Dirt, gravel, patchy weeds—nothing was off limits. The new trend of bikes like Raleigh's Roker Sport Complete Bike promise to save our racing machines from the abuse of all-terrain cycling by combining the punchy responsiveness of carbon fiber with the frame geometry and tire clearance of a bike that isn't afraid to push on when the road ends.

Compared to a traditional, all-purpose road racing machine, the Roker's bottom bracket sits about 7mm lower and its head tube is around 1.5 degrees slacker. While dimensions like wheelbase, stack, and reach are all similarly gravel-minded, the Roker's low slackness are the primary contributors to the bike's confident stability across all manner of surfaces. When paired with the above mentioned carbon fiber and the kind of stiff thru-axles we'd expect to see on enduro sleds, the frame's geometry dispatches stretches of rough terrain with the same ease that it punches up steep forest paths.

As with the frameset itself, the Roker Sport's component spec is eminently abuse-able. It's largely composed of Shimano Tiagra with a strong supporting cameo by TRP's Spyre mechanical disc brakes. The build kit's biggest highlight might be the surprisingly sexy finishing touch in the form of Clement tires. Raleigh assures us that the frame has clearance for 45mm tires, but the included 40mm X'PLOR MSO donuts ride so well across everything from smooth tarmac to gravel and washboard fire roads that we can't think of any reason to replace them. A big part of their success are the rims, of course, which boast a 24mm internal (28mm external) width. That Herculean dimension allows the tires to fill out far more than the typical plus-size rims, which top out at just under 21mm internally.