Surly Midnight Special review: a sublime steel all-roader – but can you live with the weight?

Surly’s take on the endurance bike is designed for all-day road rides, in all weather and on all surfaces.

Priced at £2,399 / $2,349, It's a heady mix of skinny steel, lots of features and a ride position that majors on comfort and is big on control.

Add in huge tyre clearances and the Midnight Special is a real all-roader with its classy mix of modern and retro. It lives up to Surly’s reputation for making solid bikes that are built to last.

Surly Midnight Special frameset

The Midnight Special is built from Surly’s proprietary Natch tubing. It’s a 4130-based chromoly with custom double-butting used for the main triangle.

The frame is paired with a 4130 chromoly fork, with neatly brazed lugs and provision for a mudguard and a front rack (dropout, upper or mid-fork fittings).

The main frame is similarly well-appointed with rack, mudguard and even down-tube bosses for external cable routing, that can also be used for the full retro experience of down-tube shifters.

Surly has always been a proponent of using larger tyres on its road bikes. The frame has the signature FFF (fatties fit fine) swoopy chainstays.

So, even with the Midnight Special’s svelte classic steel road bike look, the frame can take up to 42mm road tyres (38mm with fenders).

There are modern flat mounts for the brakes and thru-axle compatibility front and rear (12x142mm rear and 12x100mm front).

That said, cleverly, the dropouts are open-ended – with the use of Surly’s 10mm/12mm adaptor washers, you could choose to run the Midnight Special with old-school quick-release skewers.

The bottom bracket is a threaded BSA model, and the seatpost diameter is a standard 27.2mm, rounding off a nicely appointed frameset that mixes modern touches and proven standards neatly.

The paint is stunning; the almost metal-flake Fool’s gold colourway is finished beautifully. For less extroverted riders, Surly also offers classic black, and if you want something softer, there’s a smooth-looking metallic lilac colourway too.

Here, the lustrous paint finish gives the Midnight Special the look of custom steel to my eye – impressive for a frameset that retails for £899.99.

There’s also a practical element to the finish. Surly fully coats its frames with an electrophoretic disposition process before the final paint finish. This process means fully submerging the frame and fork in a liquid with paint suspended within it.

This is then electrically charged, which causes the paint to adhere fully to the metal with a uniform thickness inside and out.

It’s claimed to prevent corrosion and be incredibly tough compared to standard primed and painted steel. That should mean no worries about dreaded rust worm getting the better of your pride and joy.

Surly Midnight Special geometry

Geometry-wise, the Midnight Special fits between a full-on race bike and an endurance bike.

My 58cm test bike has a long 402mm reach and a 599mm stack. In contrast, a Giant Defy Advanced comes with a 596mm stack and 393mm reach.

The angles are classic road bike – 73 degrees for the head tube and seat tube, and the 1,027mm wheelbase is about as tight as you can go while maintaining the generous tyre clearance of 42mm.

Surly Midnight Special specification

The UK specification comes with a wealth of parts from Genetic, along with wheels from Halo. Both are brands owned by Surly’s UK distributor, Ison.

For US customers, the Midnight special replaces Halo with a build of Alexrims and Novatec hubs, and the Genetic hardware is replaced by a Promax stem and post and Salsa’s classic Cowbell bar.

Both share the same Shimano R7100 12-speed 105 drivetrain and 105 hydraulic brakes, combined with Shimano’s six-bolt RT26 rotors.

The 50/34 crankset and 11-34 cassette are welcome, and the default gearing I’d recommend for most riders on long road rides over any terrain.

The Genetic STV hardware used throughout is all good-quality mid-range kit.

The STV handlebar shape is very well considered for an endurance bike. The mix of shallow 120mm drop and short 70mm reach means even a relatively inflexible rider will be able to spend plenty of time comfortably down in the drops.

It’s good to see size-specific bar width and stem lengths across the massive size range Surly offers.

This ranges from a 70mm stem and 40cm bar on the smallest 40cm frame size up to a long 120mm stem and wide 46cm bar on the huge 64cm-sized bike.

My 58cm bike came with a 44 cm-wide bar and a long 120mm stem. The stem and bar are scaled with the bike size – being able to change these components at point of purchase is dependent on the store.

The Halo Vapour GXC wheelset is Halo’s lightest all-road/gravel alloy wheelset, claimed to weigh in at 1,805g a pair. The 21mm internal width is capable of supporting wider tyres, certainly up to the limits of the Midnight Special frame.

The wheels come with Halo’s highly regarded Supadrive freehub with its 120 points of engagement for almost instant pick-up of just 3 degrees, and with it a reputation for toughness (Halo has fitted the Supadrive to its mountain bike wheels for years).

It also makes the noise of an angry wasp when freewheeling, which never gets old – although it might not be to everyone’s taste.

Wrapping the Halo wheels are Schwalbe’s G-One Speed tyres in 700x38c size. The G-One Speed is Schwalbe’s least aggressive (fastest) gravel tyre from the G-One family.

The tightly spaced tread is designed to roll fast on tarmac but give grip on gravel in the dry. Schwalbe says it’s also designed with toughness and durability in mind.

Surly Midnight Special ride impressions

The Midnight Special reminds me just how good the best steel bikes were. The combination of skinny, compliant tubes and purposeful geometry gives a ride quality that’s a winning combination of smooth and sharp.

There’s certainly something in the look of a classic steel frame such as this, too, be it the horizontal top tube, external exposed cables or small details such as the braze-on bosses and the ornate dropouts.

It’s not all retro-flavoured, though, thankfully. The oversized straight-through 44mm-wide head tube eliminates the sketchy front-end twisting of skinny steel, and the chunky unicrown fork may not look as elegant as a filet-brazed crown, but it's simpler and helps offer the wide tyre clearances.

The ride position is sporty without being over-stretched. The classic frame angles and a fork trail that works out at 56mm with the 38mm tyres give steering responses that are more akin to a race bike than the type of steady touring bike the Midnight Special could easily be mistaken for.

The smooth-rolling combination of tyres and frameset is matched well to the classic endurance bike gearing.

The Midnight Special doesn’t feel as punchy and quick as a modern carbon endurance bike such as the Giant Defy. However, a lot of that will be down to the 11.1kg weight.

The pickup from the rapid Supadrive freehub is certainly ample, and the steering responses too. It just takes a little longer for the Surly to get up to road speed in comparison.

The same is true when heading uphill; the bike's mass and the chunky tyres make the Midnight Special a sit-in-and-spin sort of ascender rather than a get-up-and-attack partner.

Descending is brilliant fun – the smooth ride, big tyres and extra mass help keep the Midnight Special planted on the road and it's great at holding its line.

Rough surfaces, potholes and even gravel roads do little to upset the Surly’s progress.

The Shimano 105 12-speed drivetrain and brakes impress as usual, with accurate shifting and strong, controllable braking.

Shimano maintains the standard others can’t get close to when it comes to mechanical road bike groupsets.

On a couple of truly foul-weather rides, the brakes became a little vocal under hard braking, but they were thankfully free of scraping.

Where bikes such as Genesis’s similar Croix de Fer 40 have one wheel firmly planted in the gravel space and back that up with all-road ability, the Surly flips that to being predominantly an all-road ride, yet capable enough for the occasional off-road jaunt.

Surly Midnight Special bottom line

If you can live with the extra weight compared to carbon or aluminium that steel brings, the Midnight Special is a brilliant bike.

Its smooth and confidence-inspiring on-road manners (with great looks and slick attention to detail) make for a bike that’s capable at mastering pretty much anything you throw at it – daily commutes, winter training, big road rides and even the odd multi-surface adventure.

The only question around the Midnight Special is, do you go for one of the off-the-peg options (UK or USA) or take advantage of Surly making the Midnight Special available as a frameset (£899.99) and build your own to meet your exact needs?

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