Festka’s One is your dream road bike… for £12,000
Custom Czech build is dripping in Super Record, ENVE and Tune loveliness
Published:
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.
- 5 of the world’s most exclusive road superbikes
- Teacher brings custom frame building to the classroom
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 Luke is the deputy editor at BikeRadar and has been fettling with 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 and hill climb try hard. Jack thinks nothing of bikepacking after work to sleep in a ditch or taking on a daft challenge for the BikeRadar YouTube channel. He is also a regular contributor to the BikeRadar podcast. With a near encyclopaedic knowledge of cycling tech, ranging from the most esoteric retro niche to the most cutting-edge modern kit, Jack takes pride in his ability to seek out stories that would otherwise go unreported. He is also particularly fond of tan-wall tyres, dynamo lights, cup and cone bearings, and skids. Jack has been writing about and testing bikes for more than five years now, has a background working in bike shops for years before that, and is regularly found riding a mix of weird and wonderful machines. Jack can also often be seen zooming about with his partner aboard their beloved tandem, Cecil.
