Ridley grows their Kanzo gravel bike family with an all-new carbon Kanzo Adventure bikepacking bike designed for the road less traveled.. or even the trail. While the Kanzo line-up already has a fast aero gravel bike, an all-road gravel bike, and a middle-of-the-road gravel bike, the new Kanzo Adventure is the first to really open up limitless possibilities on bigger tires, more mounts, and more off-road bikepacking customization options.
Ridley Kanzo Adventure carbon gravel bikepacking bike
Whether you need a lot bigger… even mountain bike tire clearance, more mounts than you can shake an Anything Cage at, or endless customization options like dynamo-powered built-in lighting, a gravel suspension fork, or 4-season fenders, Ridley’s all-new carbon Kanzo Adventure gravel bike is their most capable & versatile yet.
Ridley has built gravel bikes since back when we still called them cross bikes. In fact, their first dedicated gravel bike was the X-Trail back 7 years ago (get it… cross trail riding), that since evolved into more of an all-road gravel bike as gravel riding got more technical. Then, their recent Kanzo Fast reimagined an aero gravel racing bike, evolved directly out of their Noah Fast aero road bike platform.
Now, the Kanzo Adventure turns it up a notch for off-road capability as a properly versatile adventure-ready bikepacking gravel bike that’s begging to ride singletrack, too. Ridley says it’s the bike for when you don’t want to worry about making a plan ahead of time.
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First Riding Impressions: Coming Soon
That’s a kind of riding I can get behind, and I gave the new Kanzo Adventure a fair share of blindly riding out into the woods in search of adventure. Suffice it to say this is as fun a bike on tight singletrack descent as it is eating up loose gravel roads. Keep your eyes peeled for a First Rides Review, coming soon to a Bikerumor near you…
Kanzo Optimized Geometry
Ridley gives the Kanzo Adventure off-road stable geometry adapted from the mountain bike side of things for riding rough gravel terrain and trails. That amounts to a one degree slacker 70.5° head angle than the Kanzo Fast, slight steeper 74° seattube, 15mm longer frame Reach, shorter stem, a bit more BB drop, plus a longer 435mm set of chainstays for longer wheelbase overall, and more stable handling.
There’s a lot of modern trail bike geo in the new Kanzo Adventure, with the familiar goal of getting weight forward to better balance steep climbing efficiency with confident & controlled descending – fully-loaded or not.
The adventurous bike also is ready for a short-travel gravel suspension fork, too. Ridley kept the fork axle-to-crown (a-c) standard at 400mm (w/ 5omm rake), but kept frame Stack figures low, so adding 40-50mm of travel up front wouldn’t raise the bar too much. The side benefit of a slightly longer suspension fork a-c is it slackens out the head angle a degree or so more, but there’s plenty of leeway thanks to the lowered BB & steeper seat angle.
Bikepacking Adventure Details
Ridley (over)built the carbon Kanzo Adventure to tackle any terrain, and to pass MTB test standards, so they leaned more on durability than ultimate lightweight. At 1250g for an unpainted medium paired to a 499g uncut fork, it sounds a bit heavy. But for a bike with something like 27 braze-on mounts, maybe that’s not so heavy. Ridley does say that a complete SRAM Rival XPLR build is just 9kg (M) in the end, which is on par with pretty much the best other gravel adventure bikes I’ve weighed.
The Kanzo Adventure really does get all the mounts, with 3-pack Anything Cage mounts on the seattube, under the bottom bracket on the downtube, and super low on each fork leg that can carry 3kg per side (or 9kg total with a low-rider rack setup). Inside the main triangle on the downtube, there’s even a 4-pack of bosses, so you can mount a regular water bottle AND a tool cage, or just have the flexibility to adjust bottle cage location to fit with bikepacking frame bags.
There’s also a toptube direct mount, which Ridley sets down into the flat tube so a bag will mount flush & secure (often without the need for a steerer strap) or you can cover them if you prefer a simpler cockpit setup.
Ridley also supplies the bike with a small ‘dog bone’ mount for the toptube bosses, that lets you attach a velcro strap instead of a bag for a more minimalist to carry a spare tube or tools.
If you are looking for more mounts, there’s also tabs for full-coverage fenders front & rear, plus internal fork & frame routing for a dynamo hub and wiring to light up your adventures and keep your gadgets charged on the go – and a fork crown light mounting point. Later this summer, Ridley will even let you custom spec a bike with dynamo & lights, and will deliver it to you fully set up & wired, hassle-free.
Big tire clearance goes a long way to ensuring off-road capability, and Ridley has designed the Kanzo Adventure to fit up to 29 x 2.1″ tires (real 700c x 56mm width), with ample clearance. That’s plenty of room for fast-rolling mountain bike tires and a bit of mud, but most Kanzo Adventure bikes will likely get built up with 700 x 44-48mm gravel tires for balanced speed & control, on & off-road.
Tech details
The new carbon Kanzo Adventure features a dropped seatstay design, with a wide flattened seatube below and a round tube above that transitions to the standard round 27.2mm seatpost with a hidden wedge-style clamp.
The bike also gets fully internal cable routing, but thanks to Ridley’s D-shaped F-Steerer, it still managed to stick with a more common 1.125-1.5″ tapered steerer tube & internal headset.
Instead of trying to make everything more aero, Ridley’s integrated adventure setup is about getting cables out of the way of bikepacking bag straps, protected in case of a crash, and still fully adjustable by entering via the conventional alloy stem.
The bike is 1x only, but Ridley offers it with Classified Powershift drivetrains for those looking for traditional road double gearing spreads without compromise. The Kanzo Adventure gets a PressFit BB86 bottom bracket, flat mount disc brake tabs, and 12mm thru-axles.
Ridley Kanzo Adventure – Pricing, options & availability
The new Kanzo Adventure comes in five stock sizes (XS-XL) which tend to seem one size bigger if you compared their Stack/Reach to racy gravel bikes. But that’s pretty much in line with the MTB-inspired geo and a more upright comfort fit.
Ridley has a few stock builds available already like a $4589 / 3475€ SRAM Rival 1×11 mechanical, a $5279 / 3999€ Shimano GRX 1×11 mechanical, or a wireless $6469 / 4899€ SRAM Rival AXS XPLR 1×12 with carbon wheels.
Or they let you customize your build with the Ridley online Configurator to build your own dream bike…
Part of that is the possibility to create your own customized paint job or color scheme at very little extra cost, or just to tweak the component spec to perfectly suit your style of adventure gravel riding.
The new Kanzo Adventure is available now in limited numbers in Ridley dealer shops, and can be customized online now for deliveries this summer.
