Landrace Tupelo frameset

From epic multi-day bikepacking trips to smooth tarmac cruises, the Landrace Tupelo effortlessly adapts to every adventure with reliable performance and comfort. With a ride quality that excels both on the road and off, this titanium frameset is an excellent companion for adventure-hungry cyclists seeking a bike for a lifetime – especially as you get a custom fit as part of the package.

Want a bike that'll last forever? Check out our guide to the best titanium road bikes.

> Buy now: Landrace Tupelo frameset for £2,795 from Cyclefit

Landrace was set up by London-based bike shop/bike fitting studio Cyclefit's Julian Wall and Phil Cavell, the outcome of their decades-long experience in bike fitting and designing thousands of custom bikes for their clients. The Tupelo is their first model.

After seeing thousands of people on ill-fitting bikes, Julian and Phil decided to do things a little differently. You can buy just the frameset and build it up yourself, but each Landrace sale includes a full bike fit. If you want a complete build (Landrace also makes wheels), Julian and Phil ensure that not only is the frame the right size for you but also that the components match your riding style.

The ride

This is the first review bike I've ever had fitted for me, and it's of course had an impact on how easy it has been to focus on the bike itself, as I didn't have to spend a handful of rides stopping to adjust something.

The bike has been with me through a multi-day bikepacking trip, as well as countless miles around my local lanes. And it has, quite effectively, convinced me of its abilities. Paired with some carbon Landrace wheels and high-end components, it feels responsive yet stable, with the relatively slack head angle of 71 degrees paired with the fork's 47mm rake keeping the steering calm even at higher speeds.

Its taller-in-height but shorter-in-length geometry suited me very well. It feels good in terms of comfort, even for consecutive long days on the saddle; when I took it for my three-day-long bikepacking trip, I kept thinking it's what it excels in.

If I had to choose one word to describe the ride feel of the Tupelo, it'd be reliable. This covers the whole bike, from its frame geometry to the components, which all made the bike feel familiar from the get-go. Even when I took it on fast off-road descents loaded with bikepacking gear, I didn't clutch the handlebar anxiously, because it was easy to trust the bike. With smaller bikes especially, this is definitely not always the case, as they can feel 'off' one way or another – either they're twitchy at high speeds or the overall geometry just never feels quite right despite tweaking the components.

The titanium frame does also add to the comfort levels of this bike – it feels much softer in terms of any road vibration than a pure alloy bike, though it doesn't quite feel as smooth on the vibration damping as a carbon frame.

Weighing 9.1kg overall (full build but without pedals), the bike is also relatively light and certainly never felt heavy to ride (the frameset alone has a claimed weight of 1,900g).

It's not a race bike – nor is it made to be, unless your plan is to do ultra-races, which I think it'd be quite good at. It lacks the snappiness of a very light carbon bike. It's reactive and effective on accelerations, but it's not a sprinting machine – though I think part of that is down to the gearing of my specific model as well.

Because I was intending to do some multi-discipline riding with the Tupelo, Julian equipped it with a 'mullet' setup – a mix of road and off-road gearing – pairing a 38-tooth chainring with a 10-52T wide-range cassette. As good as this setup was for my all-road adventures, on pure road rides it was a bit overkill, and a narrower cassette would have meant smaller jumps between the sprockets.

That said, the gearing was good for me generally; if this was my own bike I'd likely swap the chainring to a 40 or even 42T if I knew there was a lot of tarmac road involved, but on steep gravel climbs the wide gear ratio was excellent, and I was able to spin up hills that I might otherwise have had to walk.

Taller and shorter

All-road bikes are rather difficult to define, and often don't perform equally well on the road and off. That's exactly what Cyclefit has set to change with Landrace, with Julian and Phil starting off by saying they 'don't like the way a lot of gravel bikes ride on the road'.

With Landrace, they've addressed this by making the chainstay and back end of the Tupelo shorter than on every other mixed-terrain bike. The chainstay is 425mm across the smaller sizes, while the XL and XXL get 430mm instead.

There are six sizes available, ranging from S/51 to XXL/61, and I tested the smallest, the S/51cm. This has a top tube length of 513mm, a relatively slack 71-degree head angle and a 75-degree seat angle.

The reach is 365mm and the stack 555mm – so it's quite tall, and short, compared with others; it's definitely different to, for example, the Ribble Gravel Ti I've been riding alongside the Tupelo. However, the Tupelo features a nicely dropped bottom bracket, which adds to the planted ride feel of the frame.

The frame is made of butted 3Al/2V titanium and is paired with a carbon Columbus Futura Gravel Disc fork.

Its aesthetics are very understated, as is often the case with titanium frames. Titanium doesn't take paint well, which is why the frames are left raw and the welds on show. Any scratches can also be buffed away, which is great for a bike like the Tupelo, getting bashed about on all sorts of trails and roads.

The Tupelo is very neatly welded together and comes with super-pleasingly formed dropouts and bottom bracket area, and a customised seat clamp (and headset cap).

It's equipped with an extra bottle cage on the down tube as well as the usual two, and mudguard mounts, and has clearance for 35mm tyres (32mm with mudguards).

Test build

The Tupelo can be bought as a frame only or as a complete build in various configurations. Although this review focuses on the frameset, it'd be impossible to review it without components.

My test bike was equipped with a SRAM Force XPLR AXS 1x groupset, with a 38-tooth chainring up front and a 10-52T mountain bike cassette at the back with a SRAM Eagle GX derailleur.

The cranks are 155m long and from Rotor – this was part of an experiment for me to try out a very short crank length.

The bike rolled on Landrace GRV 700C Hope RS4 Gravel wheels, which, as the name suggests, have Hope hubs. The 38mm-deep rims are made of carbon and each wheel has 28 spokes.

They were wrapped in 35mm-wide all-road Hutchinson Overide tyres (maxing out the clearance), which I've already praised in another review.

The finishing kit was mostly Deda: a Gravel100 handlebar, Deda seatpost and Zero stem, along with a Specialized Power Mimic saddle (a choice of mine).

The price of the full build came to about £6,400.

Though I'm not really reviewing the fully built bike here, I will say that the components on my test bike were excellent, from the Hutchinson tyres to the Deda finishing kit, and the smooth SRAM AXS system.

Value and conclusion

I definitely took the Tupelo beyond "all-road" territory: across rivers and tick-filled ferny bushes, to rough and smooth tarmac and everything in between. From the beginning, it felt like my own bike. Part of that was because it fitted me perfectly – and part of it was because it is a beautifully made bike. I also appreciate the fact that one per cent of Landrace sales are donated to environmental trusts and charities – and each bike comes with a bag of wildflower seeds (you can sprinkle them anywhere while riding).

You might be asking, is this an expensive frame, then? Titanium frames vary in price, but generally, you're looking at more than £2,000 – and in some cases a lot more.

The All-City Cosmic Stallion Titanium Frameset, for example, is £3,500, while the Mason Bokeh Ti is £3,700.

So compared with some it looks pretty good value, though the Enigma Escape MK2 (which we tested in 2020) is a little less at £2,677, and the Van Nicholas Rowtag is quite a bit cheaper at £2,070.

Overall, I think Cyclefit has perfected the all-road concept with the Tupelo. It's reliable and stable but not sluggish at all when you want to go a little faster. The titanium frame is going to last you a lifetime, and if you are not fussed about super high-speed road rides then this really is a bike that can serve a range of cyclists on adventures of all kinds. And as a bonus, it is a bike that is fitted for you.

Verdict

Beautifully made and thought-through frameset that should fit perfectly and last a lifetime