Merida Cyclo Cross 500

Merida's Cyclo Cross 500 is a very good all-rounder, sneaking in at under the magic £1,000 mark. It's light and responsive enough to chuck round a race, and versatile enough for more general purpose riding. It's fun to ride and easy to recommend.

The build: good quality components on a good quality frame

Merida use their top-tier alloy for this frame, Prolite 66. The tubeset is triple butted for weight saving and quite heavily hydroformed too, most noticeably on the arched and flattened top tube. The welds are smoothed and with the shiny black paint finish it'd be easy to mistake it for a carbon frame from a distance; certainly it's got a nice, organic feel to the lines.

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The X-Taper head tube, with a 1 1/2in bottom bearing, feeds into a chunky down tube and the control cables run internally down it, unusually disappearing into ports in the top of the tube rather than the sides. The bottom bracket is a standard 68mm threaded unit, and at the back the disc mount is on the chainstay, which will make fitting a rack or mudguards a bit more straighforward.

The fork is full carbon, save for the alloy inserts to hold the 15mm thru-axle for the front wheel. There's plenty of clearance for a bigger tyre than the 35mm Continental CX rubber that's fitted as standard; you could probably squeeze a 50mm tyre in there, although there's less clearance for the back wheel. The fork has mudguard mounts too, although they're quite subtle: on the rear face of the fork blades and under the crown of the fork. Depending on the mudguard you fit, you might need to do a bit of tinkering to make it work.

Shimano's 105 groupset performs the shifting, mated to an FSA Gossamer 46/36 chainset. With the 11-28 cassette at the back you get a good enough range of gears for most riding and 105 was its usual perfectly functional self throughout testing. I put the Merida through some fairly filthy rides and never managed to make the 11-speed transmission skip or jump other than the odd hiccup.

Although the TRP Spyre brakes, with 160mm rotors, lack the overall power of hydraulics, they're easy to adjust and have a good feel at the lever.

The ride: composed off road, comfortable on

I chucked the Cyclo Cross 500 round a couple of local cyclo-cross races and it's perfectly capable of holding its own. At a feather under 10kg it's certainly not the lightest CX bike you can buy, but for the money it's about what you'd expect, and I managed to keep up with, well, some people. Let's say about half.

The off-road handling is good. The bike has a generous wheelbase and the steering is predictable, if a bit slower than a fully-fledged race bike. The fork is excellent: the 15mm thru-axle stiffens up the front end noticeably, and tracking over rough ground is really good, with very little noticeable dive under heavy braking.

When you put the power down the frame is plenty stiff enough to deliver. The ride is firm but not too harsh; the stays are shaped to allow a bit of flex and the 27.2mm seatpost has a bit of give in it too. There's less by way of give at the front: I found myself favouring the tops over the hoods over rough ground, Paris-Roubaix style. The Merida has extra cross-top levers for braking from that position, so it's one that you can use a lot more than if you were restricted to braking from the hoods or the drops. The cross-tops and discs can actually stop you as well, which hasn't always been my experience with trying to haul yourself to a halt from the tops on cantilever brakes.

On the road the bike is well behaved and easy to ride. The tyres are a bit draggy but you could swap them out for 28mm road tyres or 30mm gravel tyres for better road performance and still have the option of heading onto unsurfaced trails. If you're going to use the bike primarily for commuting, that'd be the first change to make. That and a set of mudguards and you'd be ready for year-round commuting. You could fit a rack too, but you'd have to hang it from the mudguard mount on the seatstay bridge, or fit a seatpost collar with mounts on, as there are no rack mounts on the seatstays.

The Cyclo Cross 500 feels a bit more like an entry-level race bike than it does an all-rounder. The only thing that doesn't really feel quite like race spec is the wheelset, which is well made but a bit on the heavy side. The bike was much improved for racing by swapping out the stock wheels with some lightweight carbon ones that cost as much again as the bike, but then you'd hope that would make a noticeable difference. You can keep the old ones and balance them against one another in the pit area for the pro look if you ever did decide to upgrade.

But even in full stock build, it's perfectly capable of holding its own in the pack. If you're a podium-botherer then you'll want something lighter and probably a bit faster in the turn, but for those of us embracing mid-table mediocrity it's more or less ideal.

Overall: a very good package for the money

A smart-riding alloy bike with a carbon fork, decent disc brakes and a 105 groupset is a solid buy, and at under 10kg and under £1,000 the Cyclo Cross 500 makes a good case for itself. It's plenty versatile enough for day-to-day use but it's capable of racing too. The handling is good, and all the components are well chosen.

Verdict

Good, balanced performance with a solid component spec: a smart all-rounder