Here’s a preview of a bike we’ll be testing in spring.
The Ultravox TI is the creation of retired professional rider, Mark Blewett, a South African who now lives in China in an effort to be hands-on with the development of products for his Swift brand.
Blewett’s company has a focussed offering, with just five models: two road, two time trial, and one hard-tail mountain bike frame.
We’ll concentrate on the model coming our way: the Ultravox TI.
The chassis is a mix of Toray 1000 HM and Mistibushi-Rayon fibres, with a mix heavily biased to the Toray.
Its design features are ‘on trend’: a head tube that tapers to 1.5 inches at the lower bearing for greater stiffness at the front end and with it more positive steering; a press-fit, BB30 bottom bracket, and slender chainstays for greater compliance in the rear triangle.
The oversized down tube and bottom bracket are also sights familiar to connoisseurs of racing frames. Typically, the additional girth brings greater stiffness and so enhanced power transfer. We’re eager to find out if it does so on the Ultravox Ti.
Elsewhere, there’s an ‘asymmetric’ seat tube and chainstays, which Swift claim delivers greater clearance at the chainrings and tyres without sacrificing stiffness.
It’s too soon for us to comment on performance, but the numbers are impressive: a claimed weight of 920grams from a medium frame, and a defiantly non-UCI compliant weight of 5.83kg for a small frame dressed in the latest incarnation of SRAM Red and rolling on Swift’s own Trillium carbon wheelset, rather than the Mavic R-Sys SLR pictured here.
The Ultravox TI is unpainted, a further boon to weight saving, and finished instead with a clear lacquer that Swift claim adds just 37 grams to the finish. The frameset sells for £2,300.
Riders seeking the same geometry at a lower price might be more inclined to the Ultravox TI’s sister model: the Ultravox RS-1, whose frameset sells for £1,850.
It’s baked in the same mold, but fashioned from a different mix of carbon: specifically, Toray 700 and 800. The frame weighs a claimed 1050 grams in medium, producing a Force-quipped bike, which, when rolling on Swift’s Trillium carbon clincher, tips the scales at 6.5kg.
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