Triple the fun
It’s an old-school mountain bike-style drivetrain, with triple chainset and wide-ranging cassette Robert Smith / Immediate Media
Most significantly for 2019, and a sign of its more adventurous ambitions, is that the gearing has gone even lower than before. Make no mistake, this is a good thing.
If your bike is carrying a 70kg rider (okay, nearer 75kg in my case) and approaching 40kg of kit, and you reach the bottom of a long or/and steep hill, you can never have a bottom gear that’s too low. This is where the very-rarely-seen-on-a-road-bike triple chainset comes in.
Trek should also be praised for making it a 48/36/26t Alivio mountain bike chainset, with a teeny-tiny 26t inner chainring, rather than a Shimano 105 road bike 50/39/30 or similar.
The 11-36 cassette offers a gear for every occasion, and I love the 36t sprocket Simon Withers / Immediate Media
Trek really makes the most of this with the saucer-sized 36t sprocket, which delivers a very low bottom gear (under 20in). The 48×11 top gear (around 120in) is more than adequate for powering down hills, and the Sora gear lever and Alivio rear derailleur pairing works well, even with the large jumps necessitated by the 9-speed 11-36 cassette.
Is that bailout/granny gear too small? Not if you find yourself on an unsurfaced road at the foot of a 2,000ft / 600m peak, which happened to me touring in New Zealand years ago.
TRP’s Spyre brakes offer very good power and control but require more effort than hydraulic discs Simon Withers / Immediate Media
The front thru-axles help you get the most from the TRP Spyre brakes, which are among the best mechanical disc brakes around with the advantage of being easier to fix and fettle than hydraulics when off the beaten track. Okay, they require more effort through the brake levers than even low-end hydraulic disc brakes, but they work in all weather conditions.
That said, the 36-spoke Bontrager Affinity rims give the impression they’d survive the apocalypse. The 38mm Bontrager Hard-Case tyres ride well on tarmac and were fine on the light gravel of my local canal towpath, and the rims will take wider rubber too, so you can fit more gravel-specific or off-road-flavoured tyres.