Gravel Cycling Has Changed A LOT!!! From Outlier To Mainstream

Ribble recently invited us to the British National Gravel Championships to let us have a go on their latest Ultra Grit gravel bike and have a chat about how much gravel cycling has changed in just a short space of time.

For more information on the Ribble gravel bikes featured in this video head to: https://www.ribblecycles.co.uk/

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Hello and welcome to a misty morning at the 2025 British National Gravel Champs. We’ve got some pretty handy riders lined up on the start line. Alistister and Johnny Brownley, Ben and Connor Swift, and probably the pre-race favorites, the Ribble Outliers, including Jensen Young, who won the TT just two days ago. What I’m really interested in is their bikes and their tech. So, let’s go and have a closer look. So behind me is the men’s elite championship where they’re battling it out for the title of being the fastest gravel rider in the country. But yesterday it was me on the start line. Let’s go and take a look at the bike that I used. It certainly wasn’t one from 10 years ago. So, this is the Ribble Ultra Grit that I used yesterday for my effort around the British National Gravel Champs course. And it’s got loads of features that the world’s best gravel riders have come to expect from a gravel bike in 2025. So, for example, it’s got a full carbon frame. It’s got a fully integrated cockpit. And as you can see, there’s no cables showing anywhere. It’s got an electronic group set. It’s got some internal frame storage hiding in here. So, in there, I had my spare tubes, a pump, and stuff like that. So, that I don’t need to have it in my back pockets. And then I can fill them full of food. It’s got deep carbon wheels that are really rather wide. And if you look here, it’s got absolutely tons of tire clearance. Now, all of these features you will find on a top gravel bike, but 10 to 15 years ago, these would have seemed absolutely obscene. So, let’s take a trip down memory lane to see what I mean. This is the Ribble CGR, a bike Ribble claim can do it all with CGR standing for cross, gravel, and road. That’s a bold statement backed up by a high spec and a very loud paint job. Oh yes, we’ve been digging through the archives and we found this. Alec Briggs talking us through the 2017 Ribble CGR. Now, I remember this bike as being a bit of a trends setter because in 2017, many bikes were getting more and more specialist. They were getting lighter. They were getting stiffer and they seemed like they were getting more and more designed for pros. Most of us aren’t pros though and some brands saw this as an opportunity. One such brand was Ribble. They thought there’s more to cycling than 23 mil tires and weight weeny builds. And that was the inspiration behind the CGR. A bike that wasn’t just constrained to tarmac. Now in 2025, that might not seem like an all too forwardthinking idea, but you’ve got to remember gravel cycling is still a relatively new concept. In fact, the National Gravel Champs weren’t even a thing until 2021. So, just how much have gravel bikes changed? Just how much has gravel cycling changed? And can I survive my hardest gravel cycling race yet? [Music] Having experienced the Savage course for myself and been very grateful for the Ultra Grit Gravel bike’s modern features, I sat down for a chat with Ribble CEO to discuss how gravel cycling has gone from outlier to mainstream and how our riding habits are influencing Ribbles’s current range and future bikes. So, Ribbles’s been around since 1897, so it’s been around for a long time. sort of within that there’s been all sorts of first. So, you know, we every ribbon bike’s built to order. Okay. So, you know, so there’s no such thing as an average person. So, our view is why an average bike. So, you know, we’re pretty unusual in doing in doing that the scale. You know, we’ve been doing um custom color. So, where you can customize your bags, you can have any color. We’ve been doing that for you know, for years and years. So, the CGR Yeah. um you know kind of originally cross gravel road and with the one we’ve brought out recently we we’ve evolved that into commute gravel road because it’s always about looking at what do people do where are people riding so we’re here at the event the guys that work here from the stores they all ride we all ride I grew up riding in Dolby forest around here because of that we see what everyone’s doing and and I think that’s why we’ve been quite early to adopt loads of these things because the people that are in that are in the office the guys that are making the bikes the guys that are in the store are asking for this stuff and we’re in Northern brand. So, it’s unpolished, right? You know, they’ll they’ll just tell you exactly how it is. Yeah. No, there’s no polish on it. You know, the bike actually that we’ve got here. So, this is uh one of the prototype Ultra Grits. So, the team were riding these long before we released them. You know, good 6 8 months before we brought it to market. And again, you just you get this you get this feedback and it’s fantastic because then you just iterate iterate iterate. And you said earlier about the custom custom colors. Now, some of the brightest bikes going around here at Gravel National Champs have certainly been the Ribble Outlier Ultra Grits. So, can you tell us a bit more about that partnership? How Outliers came about? Ribbles obviously worked with um different pro teams, you know, sort of like, you know, in different formats on and off. So, we had Rebellion that was in crit racing last year. We supported actually the women’s um Smurf West team this year. So, they were riding the new ultra race again about three months before it kind of came out. So, that’s great for us. But we were looking at actually, you know, what what which area of of sort of cycling is is really kind of moving. And it felt like that’s where that’s where gravel was. Ribbles from it’s from the Northwest. It’s always felt like a little bit of an outlier. It’s a bit unusual. It’s done these things first. And so actually the name outlier has kind of felt about right. And then we said, okay, well, if you’re going to do something really different, how do you look different? And hence the kind of like the, you know, the really sort of like vivid purple and pink colorway came up. And if you want to copy an outline, you can actually buy that. get the exact bike on the on website, can’t you? You can. It’s It’s exactly the same bike. And again, that’s I think that’s a really good thing to be able to do. You often get like replica bikes. They’re not exactly the same. So other than sort of like some of the small tweaks that some of the athletes will do to make it sort of like fit for them, actually you can ride exactly that bike or if that’s a bit if that’s a bit too much, you’re a bit more of a shrinking violet, then it comes in a kind of like in a really cool sort of like deep blue color, but it’s exactly the same bike. What does Ribble stand for today? Ribble stands out. It should be able to go up against anything. Riding in the UK, it is different to riding like elsewhere from big things like the range being, you know, a CGR. You could you could go touring on it. You could ride every week on the road. You could commute on it. It’s right down to silly things like all of our bikes have got a threaded bottom bracket. And that’s a really specific thing. You can make a bike lighter, you know, but a threaded bottom bracket is it’s going to be easier to maintain. It means you can look after it yourself. And it’s that thing to making sure it’s right for people to ride year round, not just in the fair weather if that’s what they want to do in the UK. [Music] Even though this course this year was about as untenical as elite level gravel racing gets, I can almost guarantee that all the quick guys are using at least a 42 mil tire. 45 mil seemed like the most common. Even though it was pretty forwardinking for its time, I’m still very glad that I was on the modern gravel bike rather than that original Ribble CGR. The tire clearances are just nowhere near what we have now. and gravel bikes in a short space of time have come on an absolutely huge way. What this means is that for once I actually think that bikes have got far better for consumers. All those aero touches, the wider tire clearances, I think makes today’s gravel bikes far more versatile than they were 10 to 15 years ago. And that is a good thing. If you want to find anything else about the Ultra Grit that I use for British National Champs, then we’ll pop a link down in the description below. If you want to see more gravel content on the channel, then please give this video a like and subscribe to the channel for lots more bike