Mango Bikes launch new Point R aluminium road bike range priced from £429

Mango Bikes, a direct-sales specialist in customisable fixed wheel and singlespeed bikes, has just launched its brand new Point R road bike, with an aluminium frame, carbon fork and four models priced from £429 to £619. We’ve just got back from having an exclusive first look at the new bike which will be in stock at the end of next month.

Mango started life in 2012 with a vision of supplying university students with a low-cost and customisable form of transport, first with a singlespeed and then a geared version based on the same frame, and available with drop or flat handlebars. With this new Point R, and the women’s step-through bicycle we saw at the recent Spin London urban bike show, it's clear the young company has ambitions to cater for a wider audience, and specifically those cyclists looking for well designed bicycles at affordable prices. 

The Point R was born from an ambitious brief "to develop the ultimate sub £1000 aluminium road bike, with all the features you’d expect from a bike twice the price," claims Mango. It's based around a new aluminium frame and carbon fibre fork that has been in development for the past year.

Mango will use the same frameset across the range, which starts at £429 for a Shimano Claris model, moving up to Sora for £479, Tiagra at £549 and topping out with 105 at £619. Each bike is offered with a £65 wheel upgrade to a pair of Vision Team 30 wheels. 

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There's a lot of competition in the £400-700 price range, and it's clear Mango has sweated the details to try and offer a really thoughtfully designed road bike that is going to give anyone buying it an enjoyable introduction to road cycling if it's their first bike. Mango got a lot of people into cycling with its singlespeed bikes, and wants to nurture these customers as they make the upgrade to a fully-fledged road bike capable of taking on sportives, road races and more.

With smooth welds, internal cable routing and a tapered head tube - not features you often see on frames in this price range - the bike has an appearance that can easily fool you into thinking there’s a typo on the price tag. The smooth welds around the head tube just demand you run a finger along their line. It's very nicely done. Mango is also keeping the number of decals to a minimum, feeling that most of its rivals have a cluttered and messy appearance. With a logo on the head tube and one on the seat tube, it's certainly a clean look

Mango offers the Point R in three frame sizes, small, medium and large. The geometry is relaxed with a 16cm head tube on the size medium and 105cm wheelbase ensuring handling should be stable at speed. The bikes are fitted with 80mm stems to keep the steering snappy but there's a bit more length in the top tube so the fit isn't restrictive.

Versatility has been considered and there are mudguard mounts on the frame and fork. There’s space for up to 32mm tyres without mudguards, or 28mm with ‘guards. Bikes will ship with 25mm tyres and they’ll be offering an upgrade to Continental Gatorskin tyres for a small cost. That'll please fans of wider tyres and mudguards for sure.

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Mango has developed its own carbon fibre fork with a tapered alloy steerer. They showed us a fork out of the packaging to show us the holes drilled into the top of the crown assembly, intended to reduce a bit of weight. We haven’t weighed the bikes ourselves yet, but Mango are pretty confident they’re about 10kg (22.4lb).

Each bike in the range will be equipped with FSA chainsets with Mango’s own Chasewood label used for all the finishing parts, so that’s the stem, handlebar, seatpost, saddle and wheels. Some of the parts on the bikes in these photos aren’t accurate as they are final pre-production samples.

The new Point R road bike is available to pre-order at the Mango website now www.mangobikes.co.uk with delivery expected to be the end of July. We’ll be getting a first ride on the new bike soon so we can see if it rides as well as it looks.