Saddle

Fizik have a good track record in recent years, bringing us the Aliante and the revolutionary-at-the-time Arione. The Antares sites between the two in terms of shaping and is billed as the third dimension, an evolution of the two. The outcome of the marriage is a very light, comfortable road perch with a good depth of padding.

In a world where you more often than not pay more to get less it's refreshing to find products such as the Max Flite Gel Flow saddle, where the extra spend seems to be more oriented towards good quality materials and construction than gram-shaving. The result is a plush middleweight seat that should give you years of trouble-free comfort.

No, Specialized have not branched out into hairpieces, rather the Toupe is a high end minimalist perch brimming with space age materials and surprising levels of comfort.

It ought to be a simple quesiton, and in part ?i can answer it for myself: I have the same saddle on both my road bikes and one of the MTBs (the other is a shonky singlespeed that doesn't warrant any more money to be spent on it).

However, I've noticed that a number of guys I ride with seem to have different saddles on different bikes.

Let's get the whole 'saddles are a personal thing' bit out of the way - I've yet to meet anyone who doesn't think the Charge Spoon is a comfy perch. That's pretty rare, so they must be doing something right. Other things they're doing right are making it look cool, with a nice stitched finish, and not charging the earth for it. The Cromo version is still the winner for value, but the lighter Ti version is a lot of saddle for the money. It's available in brown, black leather (for a bit more) and pimpy white.