Since then he has worked on MTB Pro magazine and was editor of Maximum Mountain Bike and Australian Mountain Bike magazines, before switching to the web in 2000 to work for. Rather than telling him to get lost, MBUK editor Tym Manley called John’s bluff and the rest is history. He got the gig by phoning up the editor and telling him the magazine was rubbish and he could do better. He was heavily involved in the mountain bike boom of the late 1980s as a racer, team manager and race promoter, and that led to writing for Mountain Biking UK magazine shortly after its inception.
John has been writing about bikes and cycling for over 30 years since discovering that people were mug enough to pay him for it rather than expecting him to do an honest day's work. Light bar with some handy extra comfort for long days out on the bike, but riders with strangler's hands might find the drops a bit cramped. And if the £220 price tag has you sharply drawing in breath, the £59.99 Race Lite IsoZone VR-CF has the same gentle flare and shape and comes with foam pads for the tops. I'm an L in most gloves, so I have fairly large hands, but I'm not exactly Jimi Hendrix.īut if you have slightly smaller hands than me and want a bar that's both light and provides an extra bit of comfort, the Bontrager Race X Lite Isozone is definitely worth your consideration. The bend itself also has a fairly tight radius, and that's really my only gripe with the Race X Lite Isozone bar: there isn't quite enough room in the drops for my hands. The extra width makes for improved control at speed, which facilitates downhill shenanigans. Our nominal 46mm bar was actually more like 44cm across the brake levers, flaring gradually to 46cm at the ends. The transition from the top-section forward bend into the drop has a fairly sharp radius so you can fine-tune the brake lever position and the angle of the bottom section. When it comes to overall shape, the Race X Lite Isozone has a medium drop and reach - 85mm and 125mm respectively - and a curve to the drop with no 'anatomic' flat section. But when it's time to get your head down and hammer, then once again, you do so with comfier hands. The foam pad in the drops is less noticeable, but that's only because I spend less time there.
It's not enough to reduce the feeling of direct contact with bar and bike, but the usual high-frequency vibration you get over coarse road surfaces is gone. Buzz is reduced and your hands are cosseted. With the foam inserts in place and taped up, there's no visual clue that there's anything unusual about this bar, but you definitely notice it on the road. There's a space for a pad along the tops and round the bends to the brake levers, and another in the curve of the drops. Unless you have very big hands, a fatter bar can be fatiguing. That's arguably a better way to improve comfort than, say, using two layers of tape or placing gel inserts under tape on a standard bar. The bar is shaped with indents into which the Isozone foam pads sit, so they provide extra cushioning without increasing the diameter of the bar. But the Race X Lite Isozone bar has a trick up its bar tape. There are 250g aluminium bars for well under £100.
That's true of all carbon bars, of course, but nevertheless weight would have to matter to you quite a lot to drop £220 on a carbon bar, if a lower gram count were all it offered. On the surface, this is a conventional carbon fibre bar, insofar as a component that is still fairly uncommon can be seen as 'conventional' it's not like you find carbon bars as standard equipment till you get to fairly spendy bikes.Īnd let's get it out of the way now - this is an expensive handlebar. What's cool about this bar is the Isozone foam inserts on the tops and in the drops that improve comfort. At 169g Bontrager's Race X Lite Isozone bar is light, even for a carbon fibre bar, but weight is not the heart of the story here.