When Ben Meir of Reap pledged to “pull back the curtain on the bike industry and show exactly how we make our carbon bikes here in the UK”, he probably wasn’t expecting it to reveal a temperamental autoclave with a mind of its own that came close to wrecking his plan to design, develop and manufacture a prototype gravel bike in less than two months – in time for the Rouleur Live show.
“Yeah, a bit of jeopardy is always good,” he laughs. “The temperature wouldn’t go past 40°C, and you need 100-plus depending on the resin you’re using. It was quite stressful. I made a couple of Instagram videos that worried the Rouleur Live social media team, but we got past it.”
On November 13, the night before Rouleur Live, Meir wrapped the bar tape, climbed into the saddle for one hot lap of the Reap factory car park and stashed the finished bike in the van for the drive from Staffordshire to London. “I had a bet with one of the lads in the factory when the autoclave broke down,” he says. “There was £20 on it, so I needed to ride around the car park to prove that it was a rideable bike.”
Towards the end of September 2024, what started as a casual chat had turned into a full-blown mission. Reap had already booked their stand at Rouleur Live in November. And, at the same time, they were also exploring the possibility of launching a gravel bike in 2025. What if they gave themselves a deadline of the first day of the show – November 14 – to do the whole process from the back of a fag packet to a rideable prototype? Brands exhibiting at the show often bring a bike with a custom paintjob or limited-edition wheels, but making a whole new bike is rare.
Meir says he and his father, Martin, a composites engineer with 30 years’ experience who founded Reap in 2014, weren’t quite starting from scratch since they’d been turning the idea of a gravel bike over in their minds for a while, looking at other brands, talking to people and forming opinions. However, says Meir, “it was always going to be an aero race bike.” Aero is Reap’s calling card – the company’s first ever bike was a radical beam bike for non-UCI time trials and triathlon. “Part of it is filling that space in the cycling market with what you want to make and what you want to ride and then hoping that other people are inspired by it and want to share the same feeling of going fast.”
“One of the people I spoke to is a mechanic out in Girona. After I told him we wanted to do an aero race gravel bike, he suggested that perhaps that wasn’t the best idea because if a gravel race is three or four hours, you don’t want to be battered. Any aero gain would be negated by this uncomfortable bike under you, and so you wouldn’t be able to put out the power. So that was the main challenge. Proving that you can have your aero gravel cake and eat it. We didn’t want to fall into the trap of just making a road bike with wider tyres.”
At a glance, the prototype – named Type 300 after the Spitfire prototype designed by fellow Staffordshireman R. J. Mitchell – has a silhouette very similar to that of Reap’s Vekta aero road bike.
“Yes, the design language from the Vekta does follow over, and that’s important. We’re not just designing a gravel bike – we’re designing a Reap gravel bike. So, although it starts with that blank piece of paper, it might be physically blank but not mentally. We’ve got these ideas, views, inspirations, and values that we pick up along the way, whether it’s from cars, boats, aircraft… And it’s only when you take it into a virtual 3D space that you start to think about the aerofoil sections. And a lot of those were taken from the Vekta. Physics is fairly consistent – it doesn’t change – we’ve found shapes that work, so we knew that if we took those from the Vekta, we would then optimise for wider tyres, different types of terrain, different speeds using our testing and our data. So they’re basically the same shapes but made slightly wider for wider tyres.”
However, Reap came up with some original ideas for building in the sort of comfort that the new bike would badly need at the higher speeds the brand had in mind for it. “Two years ago, when we were at Rouleur Live, an American guy walked over to the stand with a couple of samples,” remembers Meir. “One was just a normal pre-preg carbon fibre, and the other was this material made with bio-derived vibration-damping filament in it.” The man was Lance Johnson, CEO and technical director of Scale, a company pioneering high-performance biocomposites to reduce the environmental impact of – among other things – outdoor sports and the equipment they use. “He’s found that bio-derived composites can enhance ride quality or weight – there’s a number of different things it can do depending on where you use it and how you use it. We hadn’t thought much about it at the time, but about a year later, we managed to get some of the material in the factory. We worked a little bit of experimental magic and figured out that we could use it – in the road bikes as well, which is where we first tested it.”
Meir says Reap found that by transferring some of the damping into the frame, there wasn’t such heavy reliance on the tyres for damping, enabling slightly higher tyre pressures for ultimately better rolling resistance. “The reason people think lower pressures are faster is because you’re taking advantage of the damping properties of the sidewall of the tyre,” he explains. “If you transfer that away, we think there’s a gain to be had there. We’d seen this shift in the gravel market where people were asking for 50mm tyres, so we thought, let’s see if we can use this technology we’ve found. We’re blessed with rough roads in this country, which is great for testing these materials, and I found that when you go over rough sections, you can really keep the power on and skate over the top rather than be rattled to death – which is the general perception of how aero bikes perform. So it was demonstrably better in the road bike, and we thought, let’s go all in, try to push it further and use it on the gravel bike.”
With benefits for performance and the environment, are we likely to see more brands using the material? “It’s fantastic that you can actually demonstrate a performance benefit as well as sustainability. In the world of bikes, everyone is obsessed with performance. I will admit that sustainability wasn’t a reason to use it for us – I’m not going to sit here and preach that we’ve done this because we’re going to save the planet. We’ve done it because it makes the bikes better, but it’s really good to see that it might have an environmental benefit if more companies pick it up. We don’t make enough bikes, we’re very small volume, we’re a drop in the ocean. But if some of the bigger brands start cottoning on, then it will have a bigger impact.” Meir says that going forward, as well as the Type 300 gravel bike, all the Vekta road bikes will also contain bioderived composite.
Although the biomaterial makes a “massive difference to comfort”, Reap still engineered clearance for 50mm tyres into the Type 300, but doing so without compromising other elements was a challenge. “When you set out to design around one specific aspect, there’s a lot of knock-on effects. For example, if you wanted a nimble, agile-feeling rear end on a bike, you’d tend to have shorter rear-centre geometry so your rear wheel is slightly closer to the BB. But if you’ve got big tyres, you can’t do that, so you have to extend that dimension. Similarly, at the front – if you have big 50mm tyres or 2.2s as some of the guys in the States are riding, the wheel is going to have to be further out or you’re going to have toe overlap, and when you’re climbing you’re going to have issues… so it’s a really complicated equation to figure out the solution.”
One frame element that attracted a lot of attention at Rouleur Live was the narrowness of the chainstays. “We wanted a standard road-width bottom bracket – that was one of the things we didn’t want to compromise on,” says Meir. “We wanted the Q factor to stay the same since most people riding our gravel bike will be coming from a road background. So fitting a 50mm tyre, a road bottom bracket, and a chainring that’s 48 or 50 teeth into such a small space is quite difficult, and that’s why chainstays ended up quite narrow, just wide enough to get a brake hose through.”
Additionally, says Meir, “We decided to use something that looks like it’s there for aerodynamics, but it isn’t. At the top of the seatstays, there’s this horizontal section and, similarly, at the rear of the chainstays where they meet the dropout. Those act in a way like leaf springs. They don’t necessarily move, but they provide somewhere for the vibration to go rather than transfer directly from the seatstay to the seat tube. So, the seatstay acts as a piston between the two ‘springs’. As you ride over rough terrain, it’s somewhere for oscillations to be absorbed so that they don’t make it to the human on top.”
Meir had ridden the Type 300 around the car park before heading to Rouleur Live with it, and after the show, he took it for a first ride in Hanchurch Woods – the beginning of the next phase of testing different prototypes. “It was muddy, boggy – and to be fair, we thought there might be more gravel involved, but we ended up just doing a cross-country singletrack ride around the outskirts. It was fantastic to ride it and see how it performed, get a feel for what we’d achieved and see what we need to do going forward. The important thing for us is to do more back-to-back testing. Road testing is more constant – you can compare more easily. Gravel can vary so much that you’ll ride one section, and it will feel a certain way – you’ll go and ride another, and it will feel completely different depending on what bike you’re on. To get results you can use, we’re going to have to ride a couple of different bikes to see where it’s lacking or where it’s working well, to plot that course forward to a point where we can say yes, this is the best gravel bike we can make. But the first ride was probably more euphoric because of ‘damn, we actually made it, so it’s hard to say how good it is. My brother said, ‘I found myself with a shit-eating grin all the way round’, so I’ll take that as good feedback.”
When is Reap planning to launch the production version? “We’re hoping for spring 2025, so we’ve got three months of testing. We’ve started making more of them because, obviously, with just one, there’s a limited amount of feedback you can get. We’ll give those to trusted riders whose feedback we value so we can get different perspectives and different riding conditions. One of the things we want to do is back-to-back testing. Compare it to a Factor Ostro Gravel, Cervélo Aspero or whatever because I think that’s the best way to figure out what you’ve got. We’re going to go to Silverstone [Sports Engineering Hub], where they’ve got a pedalling efficiency rig so we can test power in at the cranks and power out at the rear wheel. And you can do that over different drums, a rolling road that simulates from pan-flat tarmac to cobbles, so nice and repeatable. We can also measure vibrations at the saddle. We made the bike with an integrated seatmast purely for speed, to get it ready for the show. But it might be quite a good decision [for testing] because it isolates this rear end that we’d like to test. Standard seatposts tend to have slightly more compliance in them.
“With the next few frames, we will test different materials in different places, different concentrations of the bio vibration damper and measure what effect they have on the performance of the frame.”
Reap has a longer-term ambition to win the Tour de France with its road bikes. Is there a racing programme for the Type 300 gravel bike? “Some chaps from [US brand and fellow Rouleur Live exhibitors] Mosaic said, ‘You need to take this to Unbound because the American scene will go crazy for it’. So, if all goes well, you might see someone racing on it next year. Now that we have an aero gravel race bike, it would be rude not to get it to some gravel races. It would be nice to see people achieving some objectives and making some dreams come true with our bikes. We seem to have captured the imagination of a lot of people with this one.”
Reap’s Martin Meir already told Rouleur that his ambition is for the Tour de France to be won on a Reap; as long as the autoclave continues to play ball, we could also see a Reap on the top step of the Unbound podium before the end of the decade.
The Reap Type 300 frameset is already available to pre-order at £5,500 for the frameset before the launch or will be priced at £6,000 post-launch. Check out Reap's website for more details.
