All-road bikes are causing a lot of excitement. But how do you define ‘all-road’? Well, it can be a road-based bike that’s capable of being ridden comfortably off-road, or a gravel-specific bike with a design that allows it to be ridden at road-bike pace on the asphalt. But which type should you choose?
The Fara F/All-Road on test here is a bike from the road-going camp but, as the bods at Fara explain, their road rides can easily go from beautifully smooth Oslo tarmac to gravel tracks in the Norwegian wilderness in the blink of an eye, which is typical of Scandinavian terrain. This means the F/All-Road is designed for Sunday morning tarmac rides with friends, but can also be called upon to happily head off the beaten track for an overnight adventure.
Norway’s Fara (an old Norse word that means to journey or venture) started out in 2016, the brainchild of former pro rider Jeff Webb. The bikes are designed to be minimal, understated yet imbued with performance and versatility, and ready for adventure. Fara’s range includes a straight-ahead road bike (the F/Road) a focused extreme gravel bike (the F/Gravel) and this, the F/All-Road, which sits between the two.
The other review bike, the Salsa Warbird, comes from the gravel camp, and it’s a bike I’ve had a long relationship with. Back in 2015, I headed out to California to ride SRAM’s revolutionary single chainring/11-speed cassette Force 1 groupset. The bike chosen to showcase this new direction in drivetrains was Salsa’s first disc-brake
