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I wouldn’t have considered myself a gravel bike sceptic exactly. Nevertheless, while I’ve long been a committed road rider and can see the allure of off-road adventures, I’d probably never fully appreciated the benefits of combining the two. But there’s something in it, you know? I found some fantastic new places while riding the Estarli G700 and I managed it while riding from my own front door.
When you first start cycling with any degree of seriousness, whether for fitness or simply for leisure, there’s a certain excitement in looking at a map. You cast your eye over all those spaghetti lines and they hold so much promise. You can’t help but wonder what terrain or views you’ll encounter when you ride the unfamiliar roads they represent.
But the more you ride, the harder it gets to maintain that sense of anticipation on the days when you’re setting off from your own home. While there are still fresh places I want to visit, it takes a good few miles to get to them these days. Most nearby roads have long since lost their mystery.
But that’s just roads. Maps start to look a little different when you get a gravel bike.
Not just gravel
At 13.5kg, with drop handlebars and SRAM 12-speed gearing, the carbon fibre Estarli G700 rolls beautifully on the road. You can easily ride it unassisted, but lean on the rear hub motor assistance and you’ll cruise along at a fine old speed when the road tilts uphill as well.
Crucially, it also has knobbly 45mm tyres and – in this build at least – a front suspension fork. These inclusions suppress any fear of broken surfaces or slippery mud and that confidence opens up an awful lot of new routes – routes that are also a hell of a lot more scenic than your average B-road.
We call them gravel bikes, but that’s just a name; a means of flagging their versatility. There’s no real gravel to speak of in my area, but there are a lot of bridleways and the like: bumpy, muddy tracks through fields and woods; even the occasional unexpected stretch of cobbles.
Consulting that same old local map with gravel bike eyes, I discovered a new (to me) network of trails and tracks. For all the thousands of miles I’ve ridden in these parts, these were entirely unexplored areas where I could entirely legally ride my bike.
They were also places where I would barely see a soul.
Exploration
Bridleways aren’t all winners – I’ll say that. Some are short tracks that take in nothing but the storage area of a working farm; others nip across fields when it’d be quicker and honestly no less scenic to simply go round.
Some are entirely blocked by fallen trees.
Some are a little on the muddy side.
But others are fantastic. On one occasion I happened on a route round a strikingly beautiful mere that was barely 10 minutes’ ride from my house. Thanks to being both inaccessible by road bike and also too far to walk to, I had basically been ignorant of its existence.
What a find!
Some of the terrain in this particular area was pretty rough, but the torque sensor in the G700 meant the motor assistance I was getting was anything but. Being on an e-bike meant I could get in a nice low gear and progress so serenely I didn’t even need to break sweat.
Not just bridleways
Another great, but less obvious quality of aiming for unfamiliar trails is that they quite often also lead you to new bits of road. This isn’t quite so obviously dramatic, but it can still be hugely refreshing if you’ve started feeling a bit jaded about some of your day-to-day riding. I regularly found myself turning down (or emerging from) stretches of tarmac I’d always ignored, having mentally categorised them as dead-ends.
These roads either petered out into rough tracks unfriendly to narrow tyres, or offered some alternate off-road branch off to the side, evading the major A-road that would have sullied a pure road equivalent of the route. On the Estarli G700 these sometimes minuscule non-road stretches punched well above their weight by serving as missing links that allowed me to create entirely new lunchtime road loops.
Personally, I found the bike’s flared drop handlebars ideal for this sort of riding. Perhaps if my riding were more weighted towards off-road riding, I’d go for Estarli’s flat bar version of this bike, the H700. I was still spending more time on the road overall though and the lower, more aerodynamic riding position meant greater speed on my way to and from whatever ‘gravel’ I was aiming for.
This also meant I didn’t need to use too much of the battery. As I said earlier, the G700 is the kind of electric bike you can happily ride with the motor switched off, or above the 25km/h threshold at which it’ll cut out.
I found the bars wide and stable enough for more challenging terrain in any case – it’s not like it’s an uncomfortably low and stretched-out riding position. The G700 is a relaxed bike that’ll lend itself to almost any kind of riding. (I kept the flat pedals, which meant it was also ideal for taking the back way into town for appointments and odd bits of shopping.)
One add-on that would seriously tempt me would be the suspension seatpost. You can also add a saddlebag, rear rack and range extender, which would seriously open up your route options.
Conclusion
The more you ride a gravel bike like the Estarli G700, the more you come to realise that the local area you thought you knew like the back of your hand is in fact dotted with any number of weird blind spots.
At one point, passing through some very nearby woodland, five minutes from a stretch of road I’ve ridden at least a couple of hundred times, I suddenly realised I was in a place I’d never been before.
Just for a moment, this piffling shortcut felt weirdly but refreshingly remote and stopping for a few moments to take in the alien view, I could quite easily convince myself that it really was.
