Pearson On & On Race

The Pearson On & On Race is a gravel bike designed for getting a shift on, and it really does – on the road and off. With 45mm of tyre clearance and ‘roadie-esque’ geometry it’s focused on speed and performance, with a lightweight and very stiff frameset and some aero attributes, finished off with some quality components.

> Buy now: Pearson On & On Race for £5,700 from Pearson Cycles

Pearson On & On Race: Ride

With some gravel bikes getting ever larger tyre clearances and becoming mountain bikes with drop bars, the On & On Race looks rather svelte, more like a road bike on steroids, especially with the aero nature of the frame details. That’s how it rides too – like a performance road machine, responding well to out-of-the-saddle efforts and hard pushes on the pedals.

At just under 8.5kg it feels nippy and responsive as well, and thanks to the stiffness around the bottom bracket junction it feels tight and efficient too. With the 40mm Vittoria tyres it has a very allroad bike feel to it.

If you are riding it on a hardpacked surface or on the road, the steering is stable – well balanced, if you like. It feels a bit like a fast endurance road bike. Depending on where I make the start/finish point of my test gravel loop, I can end up with a mile-long tarmac descent to get back to my house. It’s a proper country lane, single track in places, with a couple of twisty turns thrown in. The fastest part has good sightlines, though, so I can let the bike go and hit upwards of 70km/h.

For a gravel bike the Pearson handles very well, sweeping through the subtle bends, and hauling on the anchors for a tight right-hander did little to unsettle it. The geometry feels well balanced and it’s a joy to ride quickly.

It’s off-road where it counts, though – it’s a gravel bike after all. Here, that stable and neutral handling found on the road gives a sharper and quicker feel on surfaces that are a bit more unpredictable beneath your tyres. Thankfully, the front end doesn’t feel so quick that it becomes twitchy.

The majority of my test riding took place in the dry weather before the rainy season kicked in, and the 40mm tyres were fine, but if you want to really get the best out of this bike, making full use of its 45mm clearance shows how impressive it is off-road.

Its weight means that it’s flickable, so capable of being used on more technical trails, as well as those smooth and wide-open ones.

It’s also a competent climber, helped by the fact that the 1x ‘mullet’ setup gives such a wide spread of gears. (Mullet, if you’re not familiar with it, is a term for mixing mountain bike and road/gravel components for the gearing – here it’s Shimano’s gravel group GRX for the chainset and rear mech, with an XT mountain bike cassette.)

The geometry numbers mean the position I could achieve was reasonably aggressive: low enough at the front for getting aero for speed and out of the wind without being overly extreme, but not so low that I couldn’t go out for longer, more endurance-based rides.

For such a stiff bike the On & On Race doesn’t feel harsh at all; Pearson has done a good job of speccing a frame that has a small amount of flex, a bit of compliance where it’s needed to take the edge off. And thanks to this there’s plenty of feedback from the tyres, letting you know what they’re up to, making it a fun bike to ride fast.

Pearson On & On Race: Frame & fork

The On & On is available in two designs: the On & On Adventure, which is constructed from Toray T700 grade carbon fibre and has extra mounting points on the top tube, beneath the down tube, and on the fork legs, and this On & On Race, which only has a couple of bottle mounting points (with three bolts each) and is manufactured from Toray’s T1000 grade of carbon. 

The Race is available in either this Dawn Blue paintjob or Racing White.

The T1000 offers higher tensile strength and stiffness (modulus) than T700, so generally speaking the T1000 will give you a stiffer frame for the same weight, or a frame with the same stiffness as the T700, but at a lower weight.

It’s a good-looking frameset in my opinion, and being designed to run with wireless groupsets only gives it a smooth and clean finish.

It’s available in five sizes, which Pearson literally calls 1 (49) to 5 (58) although it’s not exactly clear what that measurement in the brackets correlates to, other than cm. What we do have are top tube lengths of 521mm to 583mm. If you want the full details on the numbers, then Pearson has a full geometry chart on its website.

The bike I have here is the size 4, or 56cm, which has a top tube length of 568mm, head tube of 165mm and seat tube of 545mm. With a seat angle of 73.5 degrees and the head tube sitting at 71.5 degrees, everything adds up to stack and reach figures of 598mm and 390mm.

The bottom bracket drop is 78mm, and the 435mm chainstays extend the wheelbase out to 1,046mm. The fork offset is 50mm, giving a trail of 66mm.

Other design details include a T47 bottom bracket shell fitted with a Ceramic Speed Uncoated unit. The headset is also manufactured by Ceramic Speed.

The Adventure models run 2x groupsets while the Race models use 1x, though you still get the mounting points for a front mech on the Race bikes, as you can see in the pics. A lot of gravel bikes now come with internal storage in the down tube, but that isn’t part of the On & On Race’s design, though there is universal derailleur hanger (UHD) compatibility to keep it up to date with current standards.

You also get an integrated seatpost clamp, and a dropped chainstay to facilitate the 45mm tyre clearance on 700C wheels.

You also get a transferable five-year warranty.

Pearson On & On Race: Groupset

The On & On Race is available in two builds: SRAM Red XPLR AXS (£7,750) and this Shimano GRX 827 Di2 for £6,100. 

Other than the groupsets, all the other components are the same, but the SRAM model comes in lighter by a claimed 0.5kg – 7.88kg compared to 8.44kg for the GRX.

The Shimano model I’ve been riding has a 42-tooth chainring paired to a 12-speed 10-51 cassette. That’s a decent spread, with plenty of low-end and top-end gears for all kinds of terrain.

From an ergonomics point of view the Di2 shifters are comfortable and supportive for when you are braking heavily or descending over technical ground. There is enough of a ridge on the hoods that your hand isn’t going to slip or bounce over the top when things get rough. Personally, I slightly prefer SRAM’s latest AXS shifters, but it’s marginal.

The shifting here is light and precise, and quick too, even when navigating the large jumps between some of the sprockets. The clutch mechanism in the rear mech has no issues keeping the chain tension high, so no fears of any unshipping.

Stopping power is taken care of by 160mm rotors front and rear, giving powerful and consistent braking.

Pearson On & On Race: Finishing kit

The cockpit is from Pearson: a flared carbon handlebar with quite a shallow drop and a carbon stem as well. The handlebar is pretty traditional in shape, which gives the bike year-round usability as its round profile allows you to fit any kind of front light bracket, something many aero bars don’t.

The bar is wrapped in Fizik’s Terra Bondcush Tacky tape, one of my personal faves. It’s comfortable, grippy and doesn’t take away anything from the feedback of the frameset.

The seatpost is carbon and has zero offset for the smaller two sizes and 12mm for the larger ones.

The Fizik Vento Argo X1 140mm saddle is one I’ve used on many bikes and I get on well with it.

Pearson On & On Race: Wheels & tyres

The wheels are Ere Research’s Tenaci GA40s, a deeper, more aero solution than the Tenaci GT25s we tested recently over on off.road.cc. You are getting 40mm-deep carbon fibre rims paired to Ere’s own Iona-S hubs via Sapim CX Delta/Sprint spokes and Sapim nipples. Ere is obviously confident in the build, offering a lifetime warranty.

I found (as Matt did in his review of the GT25s) that the 36T freehub isn’t the quickest at engaging when you are switching between pedalling and freewheeling on technical bits. It’s not a huge issue, though, and other than I was generally impressed.

They weigh a claimed 1,549g and have an RRP of £1,299, so you aren’t going to need to rush out and upgrade any time soon.

The tyres are 40mm Vittoria Terreno T50s; we reviewed them in October (size 45mm) – and we’ve also tested the T80 and T60 Pro on off.road.cc.

The T50s are the mid-terrain tyre of the line-up, and are designed to work on both asphalt and hardpacked surfaces. Being designed to be good at many things often means compromises need to be made, and that’s the case here, but as long as you don’t ride anything too demanding they work fine; as I said earlier, much of the testing happened on dry trails before things got wet and sticky and they worked okay. The minimal tread bites well on firm gravel trails and they roll okay on the road without feeling too sluggish.

They can be run tubeless, and I had no issues with their puncture protection. If you are going to ride a bit of everything then they are a decent all-rounder choice.

Pearson On & On Race: Value & comparisons

Pearson offers a £200 cashback on its bike fits with every new bike, which you can have done before or after delivery, so that’s something you can factor into the price. The bike doesn’t have to be delivered, either – you can click and collect from one of Pearson’s retail partners – but for £150 one of Pearson’s technicians will deliver the bike, check everything over, making tweaks if necessary, and will even fit pedals and accessories.

How does the On & On Race stand up in terms of pricing, though? Well, it’s pretty good, actually.

Cervelo’s Aspero has been tweaked since I reviewed it at the start of the year, now getting 45mm of tyre clearance, up from 42mm, so as a race-styled gravel machine it’s similar to the Pearson. The GRX Di2 Aspero is £6,000 and comes with Reserve carbon wheels and a carbon handlebar. It also gets a power meter.

The Aspero-5 goes one step further in the whole aero race thing, but the price jumps up by a fair bit: the GRX Di2 model is £8,000 (the Red AXS 1 model Rebecca reviewed last month is £10,000).

Orbea offers its Terra in two guises like the On & On, with a standard model (as we reviewed on off.road.cc) and the Terra Race. The Terra Race M20ILtd comes with a 2x GRX Di2 groupset, 50mm carbon Oquo wheels, and a carbon integrated cockpit. Not a bad spec for £5,699.

Canyon’s race-orientated gravel bike is the Grail; we’ve reviewed a few, and I think it’s excellent. The latest line-up has the CFR Di2 (using Canyon’s top-end frame) for £5,999. The Grail gets a 2x Di2 GRX group, DT Swiss GRC 1100 carbon wheels and a carbon cockpit. There’s also a 4iiii power meter included in the price, but the tyre clearance is slightly smaller than the Pearson, with only 42mm available on the frame, though the fork will take 46mm.

The current trend for gravel racers is going wider on the tyres, especially the front one, so for some the 45mm limit on the Pearson could be prohibitive. At the same time as I was riding the Pearson, I was also reviewing the Race Edition of Vielo’s V+1 2.1 and was very impressed. It’ll take 50mm tyres, and while Vielo doesn’t offer any Shimano builds, a SRAM Force XPLR AXS-equipped model with a carbon cockpit will set you back £5,999. That includes a set of DT Swiss alloy GR1600 wheels.

If you’re on a tighter budget, the excellent £5,000 Merida Mission 9000 is well worth a look – a bike that combines the speed and performance of a road bike with the ruggedness and versatility of a gravel machine, though being an allroad bike its tyre clearance is limited to 40mm.

On the whole, considering the small size of Pearson compared with some of the big names, the overall price for the On & On Race is competitive. (And it’s currently on offer for £5,500 for the white, £5,700 for the blue.)

For more options, check out our guides to the best gravel bikes – and the best allroad bikes.

Pearson On & On Race: Conclusion

The key point about any bike is that it has to ride well, and that’s definitely something the On & On Race does – very well. Not only in terms of comfort and ride quality, but also in the way that it handles, and it’s efficient too.

If you want a gravel racer, the Pearson is a complete package, and it’s managed to deliver on the price point too.

> Buy now: Pearson On & On Race for £5,700 from Pearson Cycles

Verdict

Sweet-handling gravel racer with loads of feedback and versatility

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