Review: Pinarello Grevil F Ekar

The 70-year-old Italian cycling company Pinarello is all about going fast. (The great Miguel Indurain rode a Pinarello to five Tour de France victories.) So when the company entered the gravel space in 2018 with the Grevil, it bucked the trend of building a slack and comfortable adventure bike for hauling sleeping bags over the Continental Divide. Instead, Pinarello did what it does best: It built an aerodynamic machine designed to put riders on the podium. In June, Jessica Cerra did just that with the updated carbon Grevil F at Unbound, where she placed third in the 100-mile race.

Like all Pinarello bikes, the updated Grevil F has an asymmetrical frame—from behind you’ll notice the seat stays, chain stays, bottom bracket, and down tube are slightly offset. The left seat stay looks slightly higher and bulkier where it meets the seat tube, and there’s a slight downward rotation of the right seat stay. This choice was born from Pinarello’s philosophy that having the drivetrain on the right makes bikes inherently unbalanced because the chain acts only on the right side. The company adopted an asymmetrical frame for a symmetrical pedaling action with better efficiency in the saddle and an enhanced ability to respond symmetrically to stress on the bike.

Photograph: Pinarello

More obvious to the casual observer, however, is the bike’s aerodynamic design, with a futuristic-looking seat post; a downtube with a flat back; a curvy, sculptural rear triangle; and an Onda fork that flares backward at the flap where the wheel slots in. These design tweaks reduce drag while dampening vibration. Add to those elements the bike’s complete internal cable routing and sublime new champagne color, and the Grevil F looks more suited to a museum than a muddy gravel road.

But Pinarello has managed a fancy form without sacrificing function. Grevil’s engineers must have spent a lot of sleepless nights configuring the bike’s geometry. What they came up with is a bike with a shorter reach (the horizontal distance from the center of the bottom bracket to the middle of the head tube) and a higher stack (the vertical distance from the center of the bottom bracket to the midpoint at the head tube) that creates a more compact race-style “cockpit.” The cockpit is the configuration of your bike’s bars, stem, and seat post, and your particular arrangement will greatly influence how you feel on the bike and how it performs. 

Photograph: Pinarello

I measured the frame’s bottom bracket, and it sits even higher from the ground than a Cannondale SuperX, which is specifically built to stay clear of the rocks and roots that could bump against the frame during a cyclocross race. This tweak makes the Pinarello a more responsive ride with better clearance for obstructions. The frame shape also gives the rider more flexibility in wheel choice. The Grevil can run 700c-diameter road bike wheels with 25-mm tire widths; 700c-diameter cross wheels with tires between 32 and 50 mm; or 650b mountain bike wheels with up to 2.1-inch tire widths.

The 19.5-pound Grevil F Ekar build I tested, and the only build that will be available in the United States until September, comes with alloy wheels and Campagnolo Ekar components, the first gravel groupset from the iconic Italian company. The mechanical 13-speed is a 1x, which means the bike has one front chainring instead of two. The advantage to a 1x is that it provides simpler, more efficient shifting and has fewer parts to replace should it go haywire. It’s also lighter, especially in this case—the Ekar drive train is a mere 5.29 pounds which, according to Campagnolo, is the lightest gravel drivetrain on the market. The disadvantage is that cyclists who live in mountainous states, or those competing in an endurance race over varying terrain, will likely need more gears.

So how does this package add up? Overall the bike is whippy, responsive, and fun to ride. I'm 5 feet, 9.5 inches and tested a 53 cm frame—3 cm smaller than my own gravel bike, but the size Pinarello recommended. With the upright and super responsive feel of the more compact cockpit, my body felt poised to execute powerful, efficient pedal strokes. But on strenuous climbs out of the saddle, I found that my thighs grazed the front handlebars and the rear wheel spun out, which indicates that I was too far over my front wheel and the bike needed some adjusting for a better fit. I could have used a longer stem; one of the pitfalls of testing a bike sent from the factory is the inability to completely customize a fit.

Photograph: Pinarello

For shifting gears, Campagnolo employs a thumb lever on the inside of the right handlebar. It took me a few miles to find it, and a few more to get used to it. The advantage to the thumb shifter is that it’s easier to use while riding on the top of your bars, the position gravel cyclists tend to be in most of the time. The mechanical drive train left me with enough gearing for most of the gradual ascents and descents on 30-plus-mile rides in and around hilly Duluth, Minnesota, where I live. However, on very steep, short climbs—like 30 percent gradient—over soft gravel, I found I was a few gears short, which made the climbs painful, if not impossible.

The Grevil F looks fast, which somehow made me feel faster while riding it. But in comparing Strava notes on past rides with my own carbon-framed Trek SLR 7, which weighs a few ounces more and has a more relaxed geometry built for endurance riding, I was only marginally faster on the Grevil F. However, per Campagnolo, the new-and-improved Grevil is 4 percent more aerodynamic than the 2018 build which, for a competitive cyclist, can mean a bump up to the top spot on the podium.

Historically, a high-end bike like a Pinarello would come only with a frame, and the cyclist would customize it with a drivetrain based on their riding style and the terrain they frequent. Today, with supply chains backed up and bike parts so hard to find, bike manufacturers have shifted instead to selling complete bikes. In other words, if you buy this Pinarello, this is the drive train you are going to get. The advantage for consumers is that they are guaranteed to have a rideable bike from day one. The disadvantage is that sometimes the drivetrain isn’t quite what they would have chosen. While the Ekar build may work great in Florida, it’s not as suited to the Rockies.

Photograph: Pinarello

The good news is that Jess Cerra, whose Grevil F was outfitted with a Sram AXS Mullet Eagle drive train (which has super low gearing for climbing, like a mountain bike), crushed the 100 miles and 5,270 feet of climbing at this year’s ultra-competitive Unbound. For anyone who doesn’t plan to eat gravel hills like Cerra, the Ekar drivetrain might be plenty. For those who yearn for the steep stuff, don’t worry, this dreamy ride will come with a wider range of gearing options, including groupsets from Sram and Shimano, later this fall.