Giant Contend SL 1

First published 22nd April 2018

The Giant Contend SL 1 is an absolutely spot-on all-day ride. It's a comfortable and versatile sportive/endurance bike with a dependable feel that encourages you to keep going and just do those extra few miles.

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It takes whatever it encounters in its stride with an unflappable assurance that's just what you want in a bike for long rides, handling everything from twisty descents on smooth surfaces to tatty dirt roads, Belgian cobbles and even singletrack trails with equal aplomb.

The ride

Shortly after the Contend SL 1 landed for test, I had a week's family holiday in Belgium booked, so I took it with me. The rolling hills and vast range of road surfaces of the region provided the perfect testing ground. I was able to ride classic Belgian cobbles, beautifully smooth fresh tarmac, dirt roads through farm country, concrete-surfaced cycleways and even singletrack through woods, thanks to an interesting bit of routing provided by some bike-specific open-source maps.

As I'm a fat git, climbing is my weakness, so let's talk about that first. The Contend SL 1 is a steady, efficient climber. Sit down, hunker into the Giant own-brand short-reach bar and it carries you uphill with calm focus. This isn't a superlight, mountain-conquering race bike, urging you to whizz frantically uphill like you're chasing a Tour podium rival, but it gets the job done without fuss. In other words, it suits my climbing style, which doesn't exactly involve dancing on the pedals at 6W/kg.

When the road surface gets crummy the Contend SL 1's Giant P-SL 1 tyres come into their own. They're fast, thanks to a smooth tread pattern, grippy on everything from smooth tarmac to packed-down soil, and confident, with plenty of cushioning and suppleness to keep the bike on track.

They're not fat enough to fully isolate you from cobbles and the bigger lumps of stony farm road surfaces, but they certainly make rough roads a lot more fun than 23mm rubber. I didn't get a chance to try anything fatter in the Contend, but I suspect it'd be an absolute hoot with 28mm tyres and there's just about enough room.

The Giant D-Fuse seatpost is supposed to help take the sting out of the road too, but I couldn't tell. Maybe my arse just isn't sensitive enough (stop sniggering at the back) but the composite post just didn't seem to move enough to absorb any significant amount of road buzz.

For me, the Contend SL 1's only slight weakness is that its high-speed handling isn't quite as precise as that of a pure race bike. I like to go downhill fast, and I never felt quite as comfortable pushing the Contend into high-speed curves as I do on a racier bike. That said, I've ridden much worse sportive bikes, with front ends so tall and short there's way too little weight on the front wheel to glue it down in turns. The Contend's not a bad descender, it's just not a corners-on-rails 50mph thriller.

The final ride of my holiday took place in Essex and Cambridgeshire. My family dropped me just off Junction 7 of the M11 so they could drive home via a detour to pick up a new addition to the canine pack while I rode.

It was a glorious sunny day and the Contend SL 1 and I had reached that point of man-bike harmony that you achieve after a few weeks' riding if the bike is right. I blatted through the lanes at an average of 19mph, aided by a south-by-southwesterly wind, but I never felt like I was having to exert myself especially hard.

In short, if you've a grand to spend and you want a bike that was born to tap out 20mph all day long, this is it.

Fit

Our size ML sample has a reach of 381mm and stack of 586mm. That's similar in reach to many of its competitors and slightly lower. I replaced the 10cm stem with a 13cm unit to get the reach to the handlebar right, but I have a long back.

Bar, stem and cranks are all sized proportionally to the frame across the size range. The cranks on this size are 172.5mm. It's good to see that they go down to 165mm on the XS.

The Giant Connect bar here is 42cm wide, with a relatively short throw and shallow reach. That has pros and cons. The short throw is part of the reason I needed that slightly silly 13cm stem to get the reach to the hoods right, but on the upside, the drops are within easy reach. You don't have to be a gymnast to get into the tucked position, so switching between hoods and drops is easy. I often found myself just cruising along in the drops, especially when I wanted the extra control that position provides to handle rougher surfaces.

Frame

The Contend SL 1 gets its fine ride from a carefully designed aluminium frame made from the 6011 alloy that Giant calls ALUXX SL. It has the full suite of modern features: tapered head tube and fork steerer; internal cable routing; extensive use of tube shaping and butting to tune the ride and save weight; and a wide bottom bracket shell with press-fit bearings.

The seatpost is held in place by a concealed internal wedge clamp. The seat tube and post have a D-shaped cross section to keep the saddle aligned. All very tidy-looking.

There are also mudguard mounts front and rear if you want to stay drier when it rains, and Giant offers a clamp for the seatpost so you can fit a rack if you want to carry stuff.

Components

Shimano provides the Contend's shifting, with 105 brake/shift levers and derailleurs popping the chain between 50/34 chainrings and across an 11-32 11-speed cassette. The 34x32 low was welcome on the short but steep Belgian bergs, but despite my affection for going downhill fast I don't think I ever needed the 50x11 top gear.

When the 105 group was first released, our Stu called the shifting 'spot on' and I can't disagree. Trimming the front mech remains slightly tricky, though.

Giant's used the cheaper, solid, five-arm RS500 crankset instead of the four-arm hollow 105 crankset. Aesthetically that's slightly disappointing, but there's no significant difference in function.

The brakes are also a departure from the full 105 group, being Tektro R540. They're not bad at all, but they still don't have the authority of Shimano's brakes. An upgrade to Shimano R55 pads would make a substantial difference for not much money.

I'm ambivalent about the seatpost's D-shaped cross-section. On the one hand it means your saddle is always straight, which is a nice faff-reduction feature, and it makes for a tidy but internal frame clamp. But it also means nobody else's seatposts will fit and I can't imagine a spare being easy to find if Giant stops using the design.

Wheels and tyres

Like many manufacturers, Giant specs own-brand wheels and tyres, and there's a surprising amount to talk about here. At 807g for the front wheel and 1088g for the rear (with rim tapes), the PR-2 wheels aren't light, but those are perfectly respectable numbers for wheels with 23.5mm rims and 24 Sapim Race spokes front and rear.

Despite battering the Contend SL 1 over all sorts of challenging road surfaces, I had no problems with the wheels and they're as straight now as they were when they came out of the box. That's testament to the strength that comes from wider rims, and as a non-svelte rider I'll cheerfully put up with the extra weight to get improved dependability.

The wider rim has another advantage too: it fattens up the nominally 25mm Giant P-SL 2 tyres to 27mm across, improving their already good grip and cushioning. Giant says the front and rear tyres have different rubber compounds, but there's something else going on here too, because the rear tyre is heavier than the front: 258g v 238g.

The tread turns out to be about half a millimetre thicker on the rear tyre. That's smart thinking. Rear tyres wear quicker because they slip very slightly when you pedal, so a bit of extra rubber will extend the tyre's life.

I suffered just one penetration puncture while riding the Contend, when a centimetre-long thorn went through the tyre at the edge of the tread, apparently sneaking past Giant's Deflect 2 anti-puncture strip. My annoyance at having to stop and fix it was alleviated by the discovery that the tyres can be taken off without tools.

That's no small boon. The ETRTO (Eurpoean Tyre and Rim Technical Organisation, the standards-setting body for tyres) seems to have lost control of the way bike tyres and rims are supposed to fit together. It's a complete crapshoot whether any random combination of tyres and rims will be easy to fit, and some of the worst pairings are almost impossible to deal with in the field. It's reassuring to know that when you get a puncture you can easily change a tube.

You might want to buy a second set of lighter or more aerodynamic wheels for events and other special rides, but for everyday training and especially for commuting, the stock wheels are excellent.

Rivals

You have a vast range of choice at this price. Cube's Attain SL has a slightly taller stack (despite being billed as a race bike) and 105 brakes and chainset, but no provision for mudguards, and skinnier wheels than the Contend SL.

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If you want something racier, then the Trek Emonda ALR 4 would be hard to go past, even though it means a step down to Shimano's Tiagra group, and if you want something more rugged you have lots of disc-brake-equipped choices like the GT Grade Al Tiagra. And if you want something very similar but with discs, Giant has you covered with the Contend SL 2 Disc, which is why I'm not going to blather on about disc v rim brakes here.

Conclusions

Despite a couple of niggles, the Giant Contend SL 1 is a great bike for £1,000. It has a fine balance of long-ride comfort and assured, sustainable pace and it refuses to be fazed by annoying trivialities like crummy road surfaces.

It's also a bike that hits a target with amazing precision. It's fast enough and comfortable enough for long days in the saddle chasing sportive and audax personal bests, while its ability to take mudguards, and tyre-expanding wide rims mean it'll point and laugh at bad weather and it eats potholed streetscapes for breakfast.

As I said in our Just In, the Contend SL 1 is what we used to call a fast road bike. It's not 100 per cent racy, but it's quick and versatile in a way that makes it spot-on for club riding, audaxes, long commutes and adding the lovely swish of bike tyres to the sounds of the countryside all year round.

Verdict

Balanced and assured aluminium endurance bike equally suited to long rides at pace and commuter pothole-bashing