The Ride

When you get on the Absolutist, the aggressive posture has you ready for take off. It accelerates with ease and it keeps its balance while sprinting out of the saddle. In the saddle the frame feels vaguely hollow underneath, somewhat like the ride of an aluminum frame. Take it over bumps and you will feel the high frequency rattles make their way up to your posterior. The Selle SLR saddle did little to take these vibrations out so I swapped it out for a Specialized Toupe gel saddle and found the ride quality much improved.

The Absolutist broke all my personal records. On the first try. It’s ability to break personal records was only limited by my sparse record keeping. My climbing record was shattered by 5% and my record for commuting to work was also beat by 5%. I thought my commute time wouldn’t be improved upon because of traffic lights, but I was able to sprint through lights I normally miss.

These are gigantic margins to beat one’s PRs by, so I did my best to try and figure out where the gains came from. For my commute record, the difference came down to beating one additional traffic light. For my climbing record, some of it comes down to weight and fitness, but there was also a big psychological component. I thought I was having a bad day because my legs weren’t feeling great, but as I stood up on a steeper section the bike felt just felt raring to go. A couple of quick strokes later I had a big gap on my climbing partner. There’s a big mental boost when the frame doesn’t feel nearly as dead as your legs and it obviously helps with power transfer as well.

Needless to say, I was thrilled with the performance of the bike, but with great performance comes great responsibility. Most notably, the bike’s handling requires care. Depending on your preferred adjective bin, the bike is either responsive or twitchy. This bike can cut through a slalom course like butter as it responds almost immediately to any command you give it. On smooth roads this handling is a dream, but rougher roads are more tense. The stiff Stiletto Aero fork tends to buck and rattle the bike over rough patches, so your hands better be on the handlebars. I myself found this out the hard way and lived a reviewer’s worst nightmare: crashing a test bike. The crash was my fault as I was fiddling with a water bottle when the bike hit a traffic dot, but it was a reminder to myself and you the reader that performance requires skill and attention.

As a reviewer, I would like to be able to say that I crashed the bike descending the back of Col du Telegraphe at 50mph. Of course, if that were true, I probably wouldn’t be writing a review. The truth is less impressive but the bike held up well. After my previous worries about the durability of the bike, I was able to remount the bike and ride it home after a quick handlebar adjustment. It helps that there wasn’t a scratch on the frame: my body cushioned its fall. I would like to know how the bike would do in a more dramatic fall, but I’m not willing to personally find out.

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