Having come off the back of a long list of testing gravels bikes with prices from £1,000 to over £9,000, I reflected on my ongoing admiration for one of gravel’s pioneering yet flawed design classics.
The Cannondale Slate was unleashed in 2015; it was a bike built for fun. There was no agenda to the design, gravel racing was in its infancy, and the ‘gravel bike’ hadn’t become the behemoth it is now.
The Slate was an outlier, built by the design and engineering team at Cannondale as a bike they wanted to ride. Not a commercial decision, not built to a price, or to meet a marketeer’s expectations.
What resulted was so different, so out there and so much fun, I loved it.
The bike was based around an aluminium frame, with geometry Cannondale called ‘Full-Fun’.
Up front was a radical-looking full-carbon single-sided Lefty suspension fork called the Oliver. This was the budget-blasting addition on the Slate; the fork alone cost more than £1,000, making every Slate expensive.
My Slate Ultegra, bearing in mind it was an aluminium bike, cost £2,799 ($3,520), way back in 2015. At that time, you could have bought the Cycling Plus Bike of the Year, the brilliant BMC GF01 Disc for £2,500.
Brilliantly flawed
After testing the Slate, I knew I wanted one. The deal was done. However, I’d found out during testing that the lightweight Cannondale TRS tyres might have been fine on tarmac with their semi-slick tread pattern, yet had almost zero grip off-road in anything but the driest summer conditions.
They were also very, very fragile, puncturing frequently, and eventually I ripped a sidewall, which no amount of sealant or trail-side bodging could fix. This left me with a two-hour trek, pushing my bike home.
I loved the bike, though, even with more of its flaws becoming apparent.
The major one? The drivetrain. Back in 2015, gravel-specific gearing was in its infancy, although SRAM had launched Force CX1 in 2014, which was still considered by most as a cyclocross groupset.
It wasn’t until Force 1 in 2015 that we had something closer to what we now call ‘gravel’, even though SRAM marketed Force 1 as a 1x road groupset. It took Shimano until 2019 to launch its gravel rival, GRX.
Gearing up
My bike came with Shimano Ultegra 6800 – a mechanical marvel of 11 speeds, slick shifts and great brakes – but it was tall.
The gearing was offset slightly by the 650b wheel diameter, but an 11-28t cassette mated to Cannondale's SpideRing crankset with 52/36 rings was too big.
It wasn't ideal when struggling up a double-digit gradient off-road climb.
I struggled on with inappropriate gears for many years, mainly because I didn’t want to give up that lovely Cannondale crankset.
That said, the launch of SRAM’s very modest Apex Eagle mechanical groupset changed all that in 2023.
Two years on, and it’s a group I think is criminally ignored; it shifts brilliantly, the brakes are great and it's 12-speed, making it upgradeable to electronic AXS should you wish. It’s also SRAM’s only group that works with a standard HG freehub, and I’ve got plenty more wheels with a standard freehub rather than SRAM’s XDR.
I switched over to this 1x setup and haven’t looked back. The 11-50t cassette, combined with a 40-tooth chainring, gives me a much better low-end range. I may not have the high-speed friendly 52-11t combination anymore, but how often would I use that?
Wheels made to order
The Cannondale alloy wheels were OK. At the time, I thought I’d be stuck with them thanks to the fork's dedicated hub. However, Hunt mentioned that it could build special-order wheels to suit the Oliver. So, I quite quickly decided a wheel upgrade was on the cards.
I ordered up a Lefty hub from Cannondale and shipped it to Hunt’s HQ in the South Downs. Hunt then built me a brilliant wheelset based around its lightweight and tough Hunt 650b Adventure Carbon rims.
I’d long since abandoned Cannondale’s tyres in favour of a few different options over the years.
Now, my Slate runs Specialized Sawtooth 2Bliss Ready tyres in a 42mm size – the maximum the Slate can accommodate (and a limitation I can do nothing about). The Sawtooth, which replaced a well-used set of Surly Knards is the best option I’ve found.
The Knards were good with a slightly superior tread to the Sawtooths, but they were somewhat weighty at 615g each. The Sawtooths are better suited to my lightened running gear, coming in over 60g lighter per tyre.
I’m still open to experimenting with other tyres, and I’ve got my eye on a set of WTB’s chunky-treaded Resolutes in a 42mm width for the winter
Personal touches
The Slate, despite its age-related flaws, is a riot to ride off-road. The fork takes the sting out of lumps and bumps, and the 650b wheels and compact wheelbase make it a superb bike for riding singletrack.
In a very forward-thinking move, Cannondale made the Slate dropper-post compatible. So I’ve obliged by fitting the brilliant ENVE G-Series gravel dropper with its unique upside-down design (so you can still run a seat pack if you want to). This is great for when you get to a steep, technical downhill section of trail – being able to drop the saddle a few inches makes manoeuvring easier.
It’s topped with one of my favourite saddles, Prime’s Primavera Shorty. Prime also provides my favourite gravel bar, the Orra Aero Gravel. It replaced the basic aluminium Cannondale One road bar the bike came with.
I experimented with a super-wide Ritchey VentureMax for a while, but that proved too wide even for my broad shoulders.
Prime looked set to be a casualty of the Wiggle/CRC collapse, but under the ownership of the Frasers Group, which has resurrected Wiggle and owns Evans Cycles, it has been restarted (along with value-packed clothing brand dhb). Both of these favourites are now available again, should I ever need to replace them.
Special Slate
The Slate is dated; compared to current trends (some bikes now include space for 55mm / 2.2in rubber), its tyre capacity is woeful. The 650b wheel size is arguably dead for gravel, too.
But, even with those caveats, I still want my Slate and I still love to ride it.
What’s the key finding from my decade of adoration for the Slate? Don’t get bogged down trying to keep up with the latest trends.
I love tech advancements and brilliantly progressive new bikes such as the Parlee Taos and Mondraker Arid, but is the Slate any less fun? Absolutely not. It's personalised to me now, I’ve got the contact points nailed and the build is tweaked to suit my riding.
My preference for gravel is a mix of gravel roads, byways, bridleways, and lots and lots of technical woodland singletrack and a few tight ridge-traversing sheep trails thrown in. The Slate was always good at that, but now it's even better.
If, like me, you’ve got a bike that’s showing its age (as am I) but you still love riding it, don’t sweat not being ‘cutting edge’. Enjoy the ride, because that’s what it’s all about.
