First look: Focus Cayo Expert SRAM

Just landed at the road.cc office the latest incarnation of the Focus Cayo Expert this time with added SRAM.

We'll be testing the bike in the coming weeks but in the meantime here's a flavour of what £2,249 of your hard earned cash gets you…

A decently light bike for starters, the Cayo Expert tips our scales at 7.94Kg (17.5lb in old money) it's not earth shatteringly light but it's by no means bad either and over the years it's garnered itself a pretty good reputation for combining performance and value so it'll be interesting to see how this one stacks up.

It's certainly got looks you can't ignore opinion was divided on the red black and white paint job as to whether it was a tad loud or refreshingly in yer face. In our experience your real feelings about how a bike looks are inevitably shaped by riding it… so we'll see.

Underneath the paint is the important bit a unidirectional carbon frame matched up with an all carbon fork. The Cayo Expert benefits from what Focus call SSPS (Stable Stiffness per Size) – which sounds like Orbea's SSN (Size Specific Nerve) where the tubes and geometry on each bike size in the range are tweaked to ensure that they all give exactly the same ride, Cayos are famously stiff so we presume the idea is to make sure that all the bikes offer the right level of stiffness for the size – we'll find out.

The rear brake cable is internally routed which seems to be becoming a standard on high end road bikes these days although Focus look to have given a miss to the other current trend for asymmetric head tubes – to the naked eye at least this one looks the same size top and bottom.

Spec highlights have to be the SRAM Red shifters and rear mech matched up to a SRAM 50-34 chainset and Force front mech – brakes are SRAM Force too. Not a bad set up – the only bit of Force we haven't got on with was the lever action – our limited experience of Red is of crisper shifting. If you're not a fan of compact chainsets Wiggle also list it with a 53-39.

Wheels are Ksyrium Equipes shod with a set of Continental Grand Prixs, last year's Cayo Expert came with Fulcrum Racing 5s with Schwalbe Ultremos – so pretty much a like for like swap. FSA supply the 'bars, stem, and seatpost while the saddle is an eye-catching black, white and red Fi'zi:k Aliante Delta which sure is wide… bit like our tester then.