Is A Gravel Bike A Good Road Bike?

The debate is endless: can a gravel bike truly be a “quiver killer” and replace both your road and off-road bikes? We investigate the real-world differences between a high-end road bike and a matching gravel bike, looking at geometry, speed, and aesthetics. We dive into the hidden costs and practicalities—like the hassle of switching tires vs. buying a second wheelset—to help you decide if one bike can really be better than two.

Chapters: ⏱️
00:00 – The Gravel Bike Debate
01:42 – Basic Differences: Weight and Tire Clearance
02:59 – Geometry & Handling: Road vs. Gravel
04:21 – The Unexpected Benefit of Riding Gravel Bikes on Bad Roads
05:32 – The Aesthetic Problem (Skinny Tires on a Gravel Bike)
07:20 – The Practicality Hurdle (Tires vs. Two Wheelsets)
10:51 – Brake Rub Frustrations
11:55 – How Much Does Weight Really Matter?
15:44 – The Price Conundrum: One Top Bike vs. Two Budget Bikes

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Can a gravel bike be your only bike if you want to ride both on and off road? Well, yeah, of course it can be. Any bike can be your only bike. I don’t believe it can be without making some serious sacrifices. So, in this video, we’re going to explain and investigate the real world differences for real riders. Can one bike really be better than two? We’re talking speed, comfort, performance, practicalities, and most importantly of all, price. Let’s get into it. It has been a long topic of debate here at GCN HQ. Can a gravel bike truly be a quiver killer? Now, we’ve lost countless hours of our lives debating this, and many, many, many people say yes. Well, you’re all wrong. It’s just not possible without making some serious compromises. Which means the answer is just no. End of video. We can all go home. No, we we’re going to get into this properly. We’re going to explain it because you it can it can do it. It’s not possible. You got to take into account you don’t for the pneumatic trail. There’s the layout of the carbon fiber frame. There’s the aerodynamics. There’s the rolling resistance of the tires. There’s the flux capacitor. There’s the discombobulator. You got to download the uploads to restart the generator. Now, before Connor and I start bickering like little children, the first thing we should do is run through some of the basics of these bikes. Now, whilst they might visually look very similar, that is where the similarities end because these two bikes are different in their own unique ways. So, I’ve got my Pinerella Dogma F, which is a prolevel road bike, and I have the Dogma GR. Now, both of these bikes are designed and optimized for racing or just when performance matters to you. Now, the main differences between a road and gravel bike are going to be tire clearance. Now, in the examples that we’ve got here, this bike has clearance in the front for a 45 mm tire and the rear a 42. Whereas Connor’s road bike, you can only really fit a 30 mm tire in it. But normally, compared to what all the manufacturers recommend, well, there’s always a little bit of room for something a bit wider. Weight is also different too with 105 grams of claim difference between the two frames with the road bike being lighter. Now, the reason why the gravel bike is slightly heavier is because it’s designed for riding on rougher surfaces. So, it’s got a bit more kind of reinforcement in certain areas to cope with that. Also, it’s designed around wider tires. There is going to be a little bit more material in certain places to accommodate those wider tires. Now, we’re going to speak about weight in this video and explain how it’s not actually going to make too much of a difference to your riding at normal speeds. Okay, let’s talk geometry next, Connor. Now, the biggest difference for this gravel bike and gravel bikes in general is that the front of the bike is going to be taller. It’s going to be slacker, and then as an overall shape, the wheelbase is going to be considerably longer. This is going to give you a little bit more comfort, compliance, and control when you’re riding on rough gravel sections compared to what you would get with a road bike. Yeah, exactly. I think what’s really key there is that longer wheelbase because that is really set in stone on a gravel bike and other aspects of the geometry are really impacted by that longer number. Yeah, this is something I learned when I did a big deep dive into geometry with my mate Tom Sturdy. And the biggest factor impacting your wheelbase is the clearance that you need for those big chunky tires. As a result of those geometry tweaks, then a road bike is designed to rail it on road. A gravel bike is optimized with more stability in mind on rougher surfaces, but still you can throw it about. For me, I think there’s an impact on handling if you’re comparing this gravel bike to an out andout road bike. I like the aggressive position, but being that this is more upright, it’s just not quite the same. Maybe it’s not much of an impact here, but imagine being on the crisp, smooth tarmac of Morca and absolutely sending it on a descent. I just wouldn’t get that same feeling. Okay, Alex, I must admit I do agree with you there, but that’s good. I like it. But at the same time, we don’t live in Morca. We live in Somerset in the UK where the roads haven’t been resurfaced in 30 years. Let’s face it. Technically, we’re in Wilshshire at the moment, are we? Yeah. But that’s all right. Okay. No biggraphy is off. But anyway, the point is the road service is not the greatest. Yeah. And in my book, actually, riding a gravel bike in whatever form with gravel tires on or road tires, it’s still a positive cuz I feel I’ve got more stability, more control when I go down some of these back back lanes. that leads to a more enjoyable ride for me personally. I just feel like it’s the bike for the job around here and it turns this sort of surface road into feeling like pristine and tarmac. Going to throw a curveball at you now. Don’t mean people expecting this. I think I agree with you. But it just but it’s only in that specific case. If you’re riding on terrible roads, obviously you need a bike that’s for it. But for a lot of the roads, a road bike is still better. But I kind of agree on some aspects. There we go. We agrees to disagree. Right. I I don’t want to fall out over this, but I just think a gravel bike with road wheels and tires in just doesn’t look right. I feel like this is quite a big sticking point for you in this whole debate. I don’t know what where you’re coming from. Okay. Like I this bike is not the greatest example cuz this one does still kind of look all right. But gravel bikes in general with skinny tires, they don’t look right. I kind of agree with you there. If it is a more like adventure focused gravel bike, we’ve got massive clearance. It does look a little strange, but this bike for example, to be fair, I think 99.9% of people would look at it and think that it’s perhaps just a road bike. Does that looks amazing? It doesn’t even have that kind of weird ungainainely feeling of too much gaps between the frame and the tire. It work that works for me. I mean, look at it. If I’m standing up here and I’m looking at the bike. Yeah, that looks that looks beautiful. Are you happy? Perfectly happy. Absolutely. There is not that’s not even like a little thought in the back of my mind where I’m like, don’t know. To be fair, this one I could get on board with, but anything with much bigger clearance, I think it’s a no for me. But is should aesthetics be a sticking point? Should it be a sticking point? Yes, of course it does. You’re saving so much money. But if you don’t like the look of everything, you’re not going to use it, are you? I am. Most people are going to buy the thing they think looks best. I go for practicality over style. Yeah, we can’t argue about this anymore. I think it’s just something that everyone needs to consider. Yeah. Okay, I agree with you there. It is something you need to factor in because once you start going over like up the range of adventure spectrum gravel bikes, it is the gaps will look different. Go just say I was right. you might be right on in that style of bike. Okay, we’ve come inside because we’re going to talk practicalities now, which is a real consideration you need to think of if you are just going down the one bike route because let’s face it, you’re not you’re not going to magically turn it from gravel bike to road bike in an instant. No, there’s things which I think everyone is going to have to consider and it’s going to be one of the first things really that pops to your mind where you think, how can I make one bike work covering two situations? Now, there’s a specific reason I have this bike set up with these tires today. And that is because, as the name suggests on the side, all road. They’re good for all roads. You can ride on the road, you can ride offroad. But what you have to accept is clearly a compromise. You can’t have a great tire for road that’s also great off-road. So, you’re sort of ticking both boxes, but not really got fantastic performance in either area, which then leads you to think, how can I solve this? Well, then you go down the route of having two different sets of tires. You’ve got your gravel tires when you want to go more off-road and then if you want to maximize the performance of the bike on the road, you’ve got to switch to your road tires, which is a a bit of a faf. It’s not the end of the world if you’re running tubes. But if you’re going tubeless, which personally I’d always kind of want to do on a gravel setup, then it’s a real pain. Yeah, I feel like you could live with that for a little bit of time and then the fun of that is going to quickly diminish as you’re like, I want to go for a bike ride, but I got to spend 30 minutes changing my tires over. So, I think most people are going to rule that that sort of situation out quite quick. Then you’re into the other option of including a second set of wheels, which does obviously start to have far bigger cost implications, but makes everything speedy cuz you can set um some wheels up for gravel, set up for the road, and then when you want to switch them out, well, changing a set of wheels on your bike is what, less than 5 minutes worth of work. I think most people can do that fairly comfortably. That’s I think a really good scenario to have. But at the same time, I think you do need to talk about price when you when you talk about having another wheel set because I think at the end of all this, the idea is to save money by having one bike that can do two things. Let’s face it. Yeah. But then if you are talking about get an extra wheel set, extra like cassette on top, that’s going to start adding up again. So, does it actually become worth it? Well, obviously it depends what wheels you get. You want if you want to run a second set of carbon wheels, for example, with the best wool in the world with some shopping around, you’re talking at least £1,000 for a set of wheels. Okay, this is quick maths here, not specific products. £1,000 is a very good price for a set of carbon fiber wheels. You’re going to need a couple of tires, £50 each, some gravel tires. You’re going to need uh some rotors. Let’s call those £30 each. You’re also going to need a cassette. cassette is an interesting point here specifically specifically when we talk about the setup of this bike right average cassette maybe 70 80 but if you’ve got a topsp spec bike like this it’s going to have topsp spec components I’m glad you’re sitting down cuz it might blow your mind slightly this latest explore 13 speaker set is almost and around £500 like that’s half the price of the wheels that you might buy and Most people aren’t going to factor that in. So, it’s just something to be mindful of is if you’ve got topsp spec components and you want to set everything up twice, it’s going to start to cost quite a lot of extra money. It is. It is. So, I guess it kind of comes to the point of thinking about what groups that you got on your bike and how you are building this bike up to make it more cost effective to switch between the two. Yeah. There’s also small frustrations I think lots of people won’t realize until they’re in the actual situation of switching wheels between bikes. Unless you’ve got identical wheels with identical hubs, identical rotors, identical cassette, you’re probably going to start to run into issues with a little bit of brake rub. The gear indexing might not be 100%. And then you’re like, well, I’ve spent all this money on a second set of wheels, but I’ve still got to faf around to make the bike run sweet. And that’s going to be really annoying real quick. Yeah. Interesting though talking about the switching of tires, just coming back to that because I know it’s a faf, but it might not be the biggest faf if you’re someone who’s just gonna kind of ride maybe you’re going to ride your gravel bike, your road bike predominantly in the summer and then maybe you’re going to switch over to the other one in the winter and you’re doing like that half yearly swap that one you can live with that. I think it’s a pain if you if you want to do a lot of mixed riding then the one bike solution becomes a lot harder. Yeah, I think it does. And it falls down to how how important maximizing the performance of you and the bike is for each situation. Because if you’re not that fast, well, a tire like this is going to like tick the box for you and go, you know what, I’m happy with that. Okay, let’s talk about weight next. Now, this is the first thing that everyone talks about when looking at different bike setups. And you know what? It absolutely drives me insane because let’s face it, weight really isn’t that important. and the weight of your bike is only the tiniest little proportion of your overall system weight. Okay, so let’s talk about the bikes we’re using today. As we said already, the difference between the frames, it’s about 100 g terms of complete bike around a kilo. This is going to differ though depending on the bikes you were talking about, different specs, different brands. But how noticeable is any weight change on a climb? So an extra 1 kilogram of weight on a big epic climb, say an hour long for a system weight of 85 kg riding at 250 W, you’re only going to be about 30 seconds slower. It’s really not all that significant. Now this topsp spec gravel bike has got a claimed weight of 7.35 kg, which let’s face it, is kind of crazy light and actually lighter than a lot of road bikes. So you got to consider that your average road bike and your average gravel bike will have a bigger difference in weight. So I guess even if you’re pushing to a kind of like eight or 9 kilo gravel bike build, yeah, really it’s not going to have the biggest impact in your performance and what will is actually your tire choice, isn’t it? And that’s something that you can change if you’re riding the gravel bike. You can go for whatever tire you want. 100% tires more important than weight. There you go. Weights and middle point. We’ve got over that. On to the next argument. Okay. Speed test. Now, this is the most important test of all because what we really want to find out is if you have one bike and it’s a gravel bike, are you going to get dropped by your mates? We’re going down a big descent. No pedaling allowed. Let’s see how much difference there is between the bikes. Okay. Right. Let’s start off at the same speed. Arms on the drops. Ready? 3 2 1 go. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Oh, look at him go. I am helpless in this situation. Right. No breaking. You must have break. I have to break. I’m running to the camera. You’re coming back. I’m catching him up. [Applause] [Music] [Applause] Okay, I think we can agree there’s not really that much in it. [Applause] All right. What were we saying? You won. Yeah, I had the edge on you there. Of course you did. Cuz you got the better bike. I had to break a few times. There wasn’t much in it, but still I think you do notice it. Yeah, it’s a weird obviously there’s absolutely zero science involved with this experiment. I see. But it is the thing that you want to find out when you’re out ride with your mates. Are you going to get dropped because you’re riding a different type of bike? This bike is not that much slower than a proper out on our road bike. It’s not. No. But you’re comparing it to a a dog Marf. This bike has been refined over the years. is totally optimized for road racing at the peak pro level. Well, but this draws on all the same like a road stuff. Yeah. Um so what I’m trying to get out of here is if you’re riding perhaps not the like peak gravel bike, the difference is going to be more significant. Therefore, my argument stands up. You would be better off having two different bikes. I think there though it brings your argument on to what you’re actually using your bike for. and what its use case is. Yeah, I think you’re right. But we need to talk more about price. Actually, we spoke about the wheels. How do you think this starts to impact in terms of the bikes you can get if you’re looking at a one bike that can do it all versus two dedicated bikes? I think this is where it gets interesting and it’s also really dependent on your budget and what you’re looking to get out of a bike. But I mean, I was doing a bit of quick math looking at different bikes available. Say you had say you had a six g budget for like a really nice topsp spec bike. Still a lot of money, but I think it’s the realms that some people are looking at. Yeah. And you and you you’ve saved up, you want to invest. Do you just spend that money on the one bike and do the two things with it or do you goss and go I’m going to go three on each bike each and accept lesser spec? I would be in a real conundrum here because also having just talked about the wheels, if you spent £6,000 on a bike, you’re like, well, I haven’t got any left for the wheels. So, you might have to do £5,000 one bike and,000 for the wheels. M. Um, if I was in that price range and I wanted to tickle boxes, I think I would get one bike and run the two sets of wheels and I would try to optimize the performance as best I can and just accept that it’s not going to be tiptop in all the areas. Um, because I think if I went cheaper on the two individual bikes, I don’t think they’re going to be performanceorientated enough. If that’s what’s important to you, I think that makes sense. What would you do? It’s a really tough one. I think, and I’m just speaking about myself personally, I would go for the one bike solution, but like we said, if you’re someone that’s looking to race, if if you’re looking to race on the road or you’re looking to do more like challenging Yeah. group rides on the road, then I’d feel like I think I’d want to go for the two bikes. So, what I’ve said all along and I’m actually right and just admitting it. I kind of don’t know what how that’s happened. Well, it’s cuz you’ve come to your senses and realized that I’m right. No, cuz I think for me, I would just go for the one bike. But if I wanted to race, I’d want the two. Yeah, it’s a tough one. It’s a tough one. And it’s very dependent on on your own. It does depend on everybody. But I think they’re the most important things that everyone needs to consider when it comes to like the real life of using these two different bikes or one. That’s the most important thing. Yeah. And I hope this video has helped you kind of sum up all the things you need to consider if this is something you’re thinking of doing and you’re wondering about your next bike and whether you could make a one bike solution work. Um, if we want to get people involved in the comments, I think we should hear from people that have tried each situation. Yeah, sure. And let us know how you actually got on. Did you are you someone that just changes your tires all the time? Can you live with that? Or did that drive you insane and you eventually just went, I’m going to get a second set of wheels? Yeah. And I really hope this video has been useful to you. Please do stay tuned for the next one. If you enjoyed it, give it a big thumbs up and we’ll see you on the next one. You’re going to go order two separate bikes now, are you? Or what are you doing? Still not committing. Just being as indecisive as ever.