The Elite Volare Mag Lite is a minor faff to set up, requiring the use of an additional socket to complement the supplied Allen key.
It isn't expensive, but the build quality, although appearing a tad flimsy, is nonetheless good. Even with our tester’s 6ft 3in and 13 stone frame, it coped admirably with only a minimal amount of flexing.
You probably wouldn’t want to be doing out-of-the-saddle sprints on it, but if they form part of your training then you’d probably be spending a bit more on a trainer anyway. As with all of the Elite trainers, it whirrs away with a pleasantly quiet purr and at lower resistance levels feels silky smooth.
We couldn’t really see the point of non-remote adjustable resistance and couldn’t imagine clambering on and off mid-workout to adjust it. We reckon, as it did also suffer slightly from magnetic stickiness at the top of the range, you’d simply leave it set on a low-mid resistance and use your gears.
With this in mind, Elite could surely simply ditch the adjustment and produce a gem of a trainer for under £100. A couple of years ago, a trainer costing this little would have been a noisy and flimsy horror, but the Elite is amazingly good. Unsurprisingly for such a budget model there's no training feedback.