Festka’s One is your dream road bike… for £12,000
Custom Czech build is dripping in Super Record, ENVE and Tune loveliness
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Although it’s best known for its lairy paint jobs, Festka is more than just a pretty face — since introducing its first lugged carbon frames back in 2012, the Czech brand has gone from strength to strength, developing an impressively comprehensive range of bikes.
The One is Festka’s out-and-out race bike and UK distributor Prestige Cycles recently sent us this exceedingly special build.
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The tubes are produced in conjunction with CompoTech — a composite tubing specialist based close to the brand’s headquarters — and are made of three separate layers of carbon that are laid up at opposing angles to maintain the strength and stiffness of the bike.
Festka is best understood as a semi-custom frame building operation. While there are a number of ‘stock’ designs on which you can base your dream machine, its bikes are produced using tube-to-tube construction. This means that Festka’s customers are free to customise (for a charge) the geometry of their bike.
Accompanied on the website with a picture of a tuning-fork, we’re not entirely sure what this means, we’re expecting xylophone-like tones to emit from the One when we’re out on the road.
The eagle-eyed will notice that the One’s dropouts are made from titanium, ensuring you’ll never crush your frame with an overtightened QR. The integrated mech hanger is also said to be stiffer than a regular bolt-on hanger, improving shifting feedback.
Our test bike is built up with an exceedingly handsome Campagnolo Super Record EPS groupset and some seriously trick Tune Schwarzbrenner mid-depth aero wheels, which weigh in at a frankly ridiculous 1,370g.
Unsurprisingly, dream bike-like luxury comes at a price and this build, as pictured, comes in at a somewhat eye-watering £12,000, with framesets starting at £3,400 rising to £6,699 for the fanciest of builds.
What do you think of the Festka? Would you part with £12k for such a flashy build? As always, leave your thoughts in the comments.
Authors
Jack has been riding and fettling bikes for his whole life. Always in search of the hippest new niche in cycling, Jack is a self-confessed gravel dork, fixie-botherer, tandem-evangelist, hill-climbing try hard, and thinks nothing of taking on a daft challenge for the BikeRadar YouTube channel. With a near encyclopaedic knowledge of cycling tech — from the most esoteric niche nonsense to the most cutting edge modern kit — Jack takes pride in his ability to seek out tech and stories that would otherwise go unreported. Jack has been at BikeRadar for three years now and is regularly testing an esoteric mix of weird and wonderful bikes.
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