Revel Bikes is best known for their mountain bikes. Partially because that’s all they’ve offered, and partially because they’re so darn good. Now, the company has taken a step in a new direction by introducing their first fully rigid bike—a carbon gravel bike naturally.
Revel isn’t the first mountain bike company to introduce a gravel bike, and they surely won’t be the last. You can chalk that up to ‘gravel’ being a pretty vague term these days, and there being a subset of gravel bikes that are built for use on singletrack as much as they are open fire road. Truthfully, this isn’t much of a stretch for Revel anyway. They’ve already been building rad gravel bikes, just out of titanium for their sister brand Why Cycles. Revel’s team tells us they wanted a carbon version of the R+ though, so they went to work on a carbon option from Revel.
To build a gravel bike worthy of the Revel marque, they started with a full carbon frame and fork and built it with clearance for big 700c x 50mm tires—though complete bikes will ship with Maxxis Rambler 700c x 40mm.
To allow for that massive tire or mud clearance while maintaining the clearance for a 46t chainring, the Rover is built with a drop chainstay design with a threaded bottom bracket shell. Out back there is a 142mm rear axle with a SRAM UDH. Additional frame details include a 27.2mm seat post diameter, IS42/52 headset, and 140/160mm flat mount brakes.
Offered in five sizes, the Rover is the first Revel to be offered with an XXL option.
It’s also offered in the two most popular Revel colors—Mint and T-1000. Rovers won’t start shipping until February 15, 2022, but when they do, there will be framest and complete build options. Framesets will go for $2,400, and there will be a SRAM Rival build for $3,999, a Shimano GRX build for $4,600, and a SRAM RED eTap AXS build for $8,199.
