Condor Cycles Bivio + Review: All Steel, All-Rounder, All Normal Bike – Petor Georgallou | The Radavist | A group of individuals who share a love of cycling and the outdoors.

London’s oldest bike shop, Condor Cycles, just announced an all-new, all-metal, all-rounder, normal bike called the Bivio + and our UK correspondent, Petor Georgallou, brings us a spirited and succinct review of the bike. But first, cheese…

Cheese… and Condor Cycles

For over a year, I have politely declined, responded to all inquiries negatively, and abstained from the pleasures of cheese, the preferred foodstuff of almost every animal alive on earth. Seagulls, foxes, squirrels, and dogs, however well trained, have willpower that is no match for the temptation of a vintage Cheddar, Gorgonzola Dolce, or, in this instance, Raclette.

Condor is London’s oldest bike shop, having moved only a couple of times from its original location – one of those times was literally just across the road – which, bearing in mind the change that London has seen since 1948 when it opened, is nothing short of a miracle.

Although they no longer build frames in-house, they’ve maintained an incredibly high standard and rate of manufacture, designing bikes in the UK and having them batch-made in Italy by relatively small but very well-regarded factories. For a single shop, which has remained a family-run business, they punch way above their weight in terms of their benefit to London’s cycling culture and their continued support for local and national races and teams.

While Condor’s focus and pedigree have been mostly road bikes and racing throughout the shop’s history, they also make more road-centric by designing gravel and touring bikes and track bikes. The cheapest of these are the loaner bikes that you rent if you visit the Velodrome.

Bivio +, a Normal Bike

Condor’s latest release, the Bivio + isn’t really any of these things to the extreme, instead its the intersection between them, a kind of all-road gravel touring shopping town bike, AKA just a normal bike. I LOVE normal bikes, the kind of bike you don’t have to think anything about because it’s just a bike, because they’re the kind of bikes that work super well for most things most of the time.

The design etymology of the bike is painfully simple and un-glamorously real, stemming from both just asking their customers what they want and a member of staff’s personal bike, built up using a Condor classic touring frame as a platform. So, on paper, the Bivio + isn’t really groundbreaking in any way, not even for Condor. What the Bivio + quietly does well is something very separate from marketing or information you can put together by looking at specs and geometry. Like most things worthwhile the good bit is the bit you can’t see from shopping around online.

Condor Bivio + Quick Hits

Available on January 17th
Custom-formed Columbus Spirit/Zona frame, made in Italy
£1299 for a frameset including headset, seat clamp, axels AND AN INSTORE BIKE FIT!
Full builds with a VERY respectable build kit and Shimano GRX 600 drive train start at £2427
£3094 build with Shimano GRX 800, PNW fenders, and a front rack
US price adjusted
2082g painted with fixings, bolts, and axles
Steel unicrown through axel fork with like a million braze-ons
1 ⅛” steerer
A normal external headset
Clearance for 700x50c with mudguards
Flat Mount brakes
EXTERNAL routing (THANK YOU!)
Internal dynamo routing
68mm BSA BB
27.2mm Seatpost

Stuart and the Burrito Run

I picked up the bike to photograph from the shop with my friend Stuart, who runs Bikefix, London’s second-oldest bike shop. Bikefix is just a few streets up, on Lamb’s Conduit street, and while I guess they are Condor’s competitor, they’re very different shops.

Stuart has ridden more and weirder bikes than I’d say at least 99% of grumpy bike shop guys, having opened his own shop and stayed there since the 1980s. So while his taste can be pretty off-piste, I value his opinion, because even if something is bad, he can be articulate as to why.

It was 1 PM and getting dark, so to save time, I rode my bike, and Stuart rode the Bivio +. By 1:30 PM, it was basically nighttime, so I fired off a few frames, and by 2 PM, I was at 25,000 ISO, which is sub ideal, so we rode around and hit up Daddy Donkey, the UK’s only good burrito shop. That I’ve visited.

How is it? I asked, wiping chile off my face with my sleeve on a bench outside

“It’s actually really nice. I didn’t expect it to be so nice. It just looks like a bike but I didn’t even tweak anything and it’s really nice”

It was a shockingly good review considering its provenance so after we gave up on taking pictures I had to have a go.

The Actual Bike Review… Sort Of

This is what the Bivio + does: It’s a fairly neutral, fairly supple, low(er) trail – than some bikes with similar clearance and front center – with a bit more stack than is normal for Condor, but as the culmination of a lot of small, and not outwardly obvious design choices it just feels super nice.

So the Bivio + is definitely for long road or mixed surface rides, for touring, and for getting around. It feels super smooth, flowy, and familiar, which I think is in part down to running a fairly flexy steel fork with a standard 1 1/8″ steerer.

It’s not a bike for racing, and the trade-off is that it feels great at normal and low speeds, with very little wheel flop, but feels sure-footed enough for riding a single track if you’re even moderately confident. You can pull a lot of what the bike will feel like out of the geometry chart:

There’s comfortable clearance for a 700 x 55 mm tyre in there or a 700 x 50 with mudguards. I measured, and if I were riding this bike, I’d be running 700 x 60 mm Schwalbe big one, semi-slick beach racing tyres, which will fit, and treating it like the most comfortable get-around bike that can ride anything you need it to for normal transport, as well as eating infinite, luxuriously soft road miles… here’s a geometry chart and some things that you don’t get from the geometry chart…

CNC Dropouts

The things that no spec sheet will tell you about this bike are how nice the custom made dropouts are. The front dropouts are designed by Condor and CNC milled, so they’re incredibly small and neat, while being super robust and having no weight penalty over a hollow design.

The rear dropouts are also CNC milled, plate style dropouts, also designed in-house. They have a removable insert, so while they are NOT currently UDH compatible, a UDH insert is on its way, ironically allowing some flexibility around changing standards.

The rear dropouts are also pretty light with a machined aluminum tab bolted on for the flat mount rather than the dropout being one piece to reduce weight, cost, build time – because they don’t need facing – and redundancy. Nothing groundbreaking, just a kind of good design that contributes to building a very capable, European-made bike at a very reasonable price point, considering the tube selection, service, and build kit.

Brooks England Watercolour Ride

I spent an afternoon riding around London on the Bivio + eating burritos, and drinking coffee, which was fun and fast but mostly just super comfortable owing to big tyres, small, profiled tubes, and reasonably lightweight (for stock) wheels. I went back to Condor a few days later to ride it loaded up with Brooks’s new bag and rack on the front to go and paint some watercolors on Highgate Hill overlooking the town.

Although badged “Brooks England,” the bag felt to me much more of an Italian affair, a holdall that attaches to a basket rather than a bike bag, which can be used as a holdall. It’s definitely a smart bag for use around town rather than actual bicycle luggage. It seemed pretty nicely made for someone who isn’t me.

With everyone’s watercolours and paper and some cups and hot chocolate-making bits plus all of my stuff in a pretty big front bag the bike handles super nicely with surprisingly little wheel flop, even track standing at lights and slowly weaving through London traffic.

We rode around, painted pictures in the grey, and stopped at Camden Town Brewery on the way back to the shop, where I broke my year-long cheese fast with great swathes of Raclette prepared by Steffano from Pannier.cc on a little gas stove. The sheer quantity of cheese made me feel pretty ill afterward, but I don’t regret it at all because it was a nice time riding nice bikes around town.

I haven’t eaten any cheese since, and I don’t think that I’ll need to for a while.