00:00hello and welcome to a misty morning at the 2025 british national gravel champs we've got some
00:07pretty handy riders lined up on the start line alistair and johnny brownlee ben and connor swift
00:12and probably the pre-race favorites the ribble outliers including jensen young who won the tt
00:19just two days ago what i'm really interested in is their bikes and their tech so let's go and have
00:40a closer look so behind me is the men's elite championship where they're battling it out for
00:46the title of being the fastest gravel rider in the country but yesterday it was me on the start line
00:53let's go and take a look at the bike that i used it certainly wasn't one from 10 years ago
00:58so this
00:59is the ribble ultra grit that i used yesterday for my effort around the british national gravel champs
01:06course and it's got loads of features that the world's best gravel riders have come to expect
01:12from a gravel bike in 2025 so for example it's got a full carbon frame it's got a fully integrated
01:18cockpit and as you can see there's no cables showing anywhere it's got an electronic group set it's got
01:25some internal frame storage hiding in here so in there i had my spare tubes pump and stuff like that
01:33so that i don't need to have it in my back pockets and then i can fill them full of
01:38food it's got deep
01:39carbon wheels that are really rather wide and if you look here it's got absolutely tons of tire clearance
01:46now all of these features you will find on a top gravel bike but 10 to 15 years ago these
01:53would have
01:53seemed absolutely obscene so let's take a trip down memory lane to see what i mean
02:04this is the ribble cgr a bike ribble claim can do it all with cgr standing for cross gravel and
02:11road
02:11that's a bold statement backed up by a high spec and a very loud paint job oh yes we've been
02:17digging
02:17through the archives and we found this alec briggs talking us through the 2017 ribble cgr now i remember
02:25this bike as being a bit of a trendsetter because in 2017 many bikes were getting more and more
02:31specialist they were getting lighter they were getting stiffer and they seemed like they were getting
02:36more and more designed for pros most of us aren't pros though and some brands saw this as an
02:44opportunity one such brand was ribble they thought there's more to cycling than 23 mil tires and weight
02:51weenie builds and that was the inspiration behind the cgr a bike that wasn't just constrained to tarmac
02:59now in 2025 that might not seem like an all too forward thinking idea but you've got to remember gravel
03:06cycling is still a relatively new concept in fact the national gravel champs weren't even a thing until
03:132021 so just how much have gravel bikes changed just how much has gravel cycling changed and can i survive
03:22my hardest gravel cycling race yet
03:41having experienced the savage course for myself and been very grateful for the ultra grit gravel bikes
03:47modern features i sat down for a chat with ribbles ceo to discuss how gravel cycling has gone from
03:53outlier to mainstream and how our riding habits are influencing ribbles current range and future bikes
04:00so ribbles being around since 1897 so it's been around for a long time we're sort of within that
04:06there's been all sorts of firsts so you know we every ribble bikes built to order okay so you know
04:12so
04:12there's no such thing as an average person so our view is why an average bike so you know we're
04:16pretty
04:17unusual in doing that at the scale you know we've been doing some custom color so where you can
04:22customize your bikes you can have any color we've been doing that for you know for years and years
04:25so the cgr yeah um you know kind of originally crossed gravel road and with the one we've brought
04:30out recently we we've evolved that into commute gravel road because it's always about looking at what
04:35do people do where are people riding so we're here at the event the guys that work here from the
04:40stores they all ride we all ride i grew up riding in dolby forest around here because of that we
04:44see
04:44what everyone's doing and and i think that's why we've been quite early to adopt loads of these things
04:49because the people that are in that are in the office the guys that are making the bikes the guys
04:53that are in the store are asking for this stuff and we're a northern brand so it's unpolished right
04:57you know they'll they'll just tell you exactly how it is yeah no there's no polish on it you know
05:01the bike actually that we've got here so this is uh one of the prototype ultra grits so the team
05:07were
05:07riding these long before we released them you know good six eight months before we brought it to
05:11market and again you just you get this you get this feedback and it's fantastic because then you
05:15just iterate iterate iterate and you said earlier about the custom custom colors yeah now some of
05:21the brightest bikes going around here at gravel national champs have certainly been the ribble outlier
05:26ultra grits so can you tell us a bit more about that partnership how outliers came about ribbles
05:31obviously worked with um different pro teams you know sort of like you know in different formats on and off
05:36so
05:37we had rebellion that was in crit racing like last year we supported actually the women's um smurfing
05:41west rock team this year so they were riding the new ultra race again about three months before it
05:46kind of came out so that's great for us but we were looking at actually you know what what which
05:51area
05:52of sort of cycling is really kind of moving and it felt like that's where that's where gravel was
05:57ribbles from is from the northwest it's always felt like a little bit of an outlier it's a bit unusual
06:02it's done these things first and so actually the name outliers kind of felt about right
06:07and then we said okay well if you're going to do something really different how do you look different
06:10and hence the kind of like the you know the really sort of like vivid purple and pink colorway came
06:14up
06:14and if you want to copy an outlier you can actually buy that exact bike on the website you can
06:20it's
06:20exactly the same bike and again that's i think that's a really good thing to be able to do you
06:24often
06:24get like replica bikes they're not exactly the same so other than sort of like some of the small tweaks
06:29that some of the athletes will do to make it sort of like fit for them actually you can ride
06:33exactly
06:33that bike or if that's a bit if that's a bit too much you're a bit more of a shrinking
06:37violet then
06:37it comes in a kind of like in a really cool sort of like deep blue color but it's exactly
06:41the same
06:41bike what does ribble stand for today ribble stands out it should be able to go up against
06:46anything riding in the uk it is different to riding like elsewhere from big things like the range being
06:52you know a cgr you could you could go touring on it you could ride every week on the road
06:56you could
06:57commute on it it's right down to silly things like all of our bikes have got a threaded bottom bracket
07:02and that's a really specific thing you can make a bike lighter you know but a threaded bottom bracket
07:07is it's going to be easier to maintain it means you can look after it yourself and it's that thing
07:12making sure it's right for people to ride year-round not just in the fair weather if that's what they
07:16want to do in the uk
07:33even though this course this year was about as untechnical as elite level gravel racing gets i can
07:41almost guarantee that all the quick guys are using at least a 42 mil tire 45 mil seemed like the
07:47most
07:47common even though it was pretty forward thinking for its time i'm still very glad that i was on the
07:53modern gravel bike rather than that original ribble cgr the tire clearances are just nowhere near what we
08:00have now and gravel bikes in a short space of time have come on an absolutely huge way what this
08:06means is
08:07that for once i actually think that bikes have got far better for consumers all those aero touches the
08:15wider tire clearances i think makes today's gravel bikes far more versatile than they were 10 to 15
08:22years ago and that is a good thing if you want to find anything else about the ultra grit that
08:27i use
08:28for british national champs then we'll pop a link down in the description below if you want to see more
08:32gravel content on the channel then please give this video a like and subscribe to the channel for lots
08:36more bike stuff
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