Upstart UK brand Bowman occupied a small corner of the Taipei bike show and we caught up with head honcho and bike designer Neil Webb so he could show us a few of the frames heading our way soon.
Neil’s take on stainless steel in the form of the Layhams has been a big success for the brand. Mixing contemporary road geo with classic slender steel tubes with a £1,333 price tag (complete with carbon fork) has certainly proved popular.
So for 2017 the firm is adding a disc version complete with neat flat-mounts, Di2 routing and external removable cable guides, too.
Like all Bowman frames Webb has also reverted to a threaded BB shell for creak free running however you choose to build it. Pricing isn’t yet set but Webb thinks it should only be around £100 on top of the caliper brake Layhams.
The original aluminium Palace impressed us here at BikeRadar and its aggressive road-race cum crit competing :R version has pretty much sold out on pre-orders alone. We’re sure the bargain price of £579 helped.
Webb gave us a sneak peek of the new aluminium disc race machine. With seriously increased tyre clearance and the same adaptability for drivetrains as the Layhams, the as-yet-unnamed aluminium chassis looks the business, and we’ve already put our order in for test rides on both the stainless and aluminium test bikes.
Warren Rossiter is BikeRadar and Cycling Plus magazine’s senior technical editor for road and gravel. Having been testing bikes for more than 20 years, Warren has an encyclopedic knowledge of road cycling and has been the mastermind behind our Road Bike of the Year test for more than a decade. He’s also a regular presenter on the BikeRadar Podcast and on BikeRadar’s YouTube channel. In his time as a cycling journalist, Warren has written for Mountain Biking UK, What Mountain Bike, Urban Cyclist, Procycling, Cyclingnews, Total Bike, Total Mountain Bike and T3. Over the years, Warren has written about thousands of bikes and tested more than 2,500 – from budget road bikes to five-figure superbikes. He has covered all the major innovations in cycling this century, and reported from launches, trade shows and industry events in Europe, Asia, Australia, North American and Africa. While Warren loves fast road bikes and the latest gravel bikes, he also believes electric bikes are the future of transport. You’ll regularly find him commuting on an ebike and he longs for the day when everyone else follows suit. You will find snaps of Warren’s daily rides on the Instagram account of our sister publication, Cycling Plus (@cyclingplus).
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