NEW BIKES
SWINGING A LEG OVER WHAT’S HOT THIS MONTH
CANYON STRIVE: ON CFR
£6,699 • 29/27.5in • canyon.com
Canyon’s enduro e-bike’s designed for the heat of battle but will it win us over on the trails?
NEED TO KNOW
● Race-ready enduro e-bike with 170mm front/160mm rear travel
● Bosch motor with 85Nm and 600W peak power – top model gets the lighter Race motor with 2m overrun feature
● Either 625Wh or 750Wh battery enclosed by carbon chassis – choose your battery to suit the race
● Four frame sizes, all with a mixedwheel set-up
● Three models, with prices starting from £5,499
What are the ingredients needed to make a bespoke enduro race e-bike? A Bosch motor for that fast, predictable response and powerful overrun to slingshot you out of tight corners and boost you through technical chess moves on timed climbed stages. An accessible battery compartment for those mandatory power pack changes. A tight, manoeuvrable, compliant chassis that carries speed and conserves energy, with the suspension kinematics tuned to provide ample grip rather than ultimate progression when landing big drops and moto jumps. Maybe even a little more ground clearance for those mid-stage sprints.
If those are the pieces of the puzzle then the finished jigsaw could well be the new Canyon Strive:ON – apurposebuilt competition bike that happens to be rather good when the clock isn’t ticking. Which is handy, seeing as the proportion of people who race e-enduro at a top level is miniscule compared to the hordes of riders hacking around their local trails at the weekend just looking to have a blast with their mates.
Interestingly, the Strive:ON doesn’t actually look much like the analogue version. The shock runs inline with the seatstays, anchored to the down tube at the forward eyelet, rather than sitting parallel to the seat tube as it does on the Strive. With far less room to work with between the top of the motor and the underside of the top tube, Canyon couldn’t have replicated the layout of the unassisted bike if it had wanted to. Also missing from the e-bike version is the Shapeshifter travel and geo system. With 600W and 85Nm of torque on tap from the Bosch motor, pedalling efficiency just isn’t that important on an e-bike, so Canyon could do away with the extra weight and complexity, freeing up space inside the front triangle for a water bottle in the process.
Nor is there the Strive’s adjustable sizing – where drop-in cups let you tune the reach. Instead, the Strive:ON gets four sizes where the reach numbers are equivalent to the shortest settings on the analogue bike. It’s far from cramped, though. With 450mm reach on the size Small, 475mm on the Medium, 500mm on the Large and 525mm on the X
