Verenti Rhigos 03

Verenti sounds like a boutique Italian brand that you should have heard of… but haven't. You wouldn’t be at all surprised to find out that they had a string of Giro d'Italia victories to their name back in the 1950s… but they didn’t. Verenti is actually the new in-house bike brand from online retail maestros Wiggle – and they’re based in Portsmouth, which is nowhere near the Med.

There are initially five bikes in the Verenti range and they’re all designed with sportive riding in mind – we hear that other genres are coming. The current crop share the same back-friendly geometry – which means a longer than normal head tube and a slightly foreshortened top tube resulting in quite an upright ride position. And they all come with compact gearing to keep you spinning up the climbs even at the end of a long, tough day in the saddle.

The Verenti range kicks off with the £900 alloy Kilmeston, then comes the £1200 Millook, which is alloy with carbon seatstays, and then you get the three carbon Rhigos starting with our Rhigos.03. The other two share the same frame and fork package but get equipment upgrades. The £1800 02 features a SRAM Rival groupset and Mavic Ksyrium Elite wheels while the range-topping 01 is equipped with SRAM Red and Ksyrium SLs and it’ll set you back £2900. That might sound like a lot of money but you get a whole lot of spec for your cash with each bike.

The Rhigos’ frame is made from high modulus 3K SL carbon tubes that are joined using carbon lugs. The down tube is teardrop shaped in profile and bows inward slightly along its length, while the top tube starts out as a flat bottomed triangle at the front before flipping over so the point is facing down by the time it reaches the seat tube junction.

The head tube houses a standard 1 1/8in headset bearing up top but flares out massively as it descends and holds a 1 1/2in bearing at the bottom for a considerable hike in rigidity. The wishbone seatstays and chainstays weave about all over the place before hooking up together at the rear dropouts, while up front you get a full-carbon monocoque fork that blends almost seamlessly into the frame.

The cable stops are pop riveted in place securely enough while the graphics are classy and understated rather than loud and loutish, although we wish they were a little more durable – ours started to look a bit tatty fairly early on. While we’re on the decals, the figures on the top tube are the map reference of the Rhigos climb which, if you haven’t been schooled in such things, is in South Wales and is included in the Verenti-sponsored Dragon Ride sportive. See, it all makes sense.

Okay, when it comes to naming bikes after climbs, Mid-Glamorgan lacks the glamour of the Madone outside Monte Carlo or the Ghisallo near Milan, but it’s good to see a bit of recognition for British riding for a change. Oh, and the weird squiggle on the down tube: that’s an outline of the Dragon Ride route. Quirky. We like that.

Ride: Think marathon not sprint

Right, on to the ride. Things didn’t start out particularly well, to be honest, because the Verenti’s gears were out when we got it and we had to adjust both mechs – a lot – to get them running smoothly. Fine, it’s a 10-minute job if you know what you’re doing, but it’s a pain if you’ve just bought a bike online and you don’t have much experience in the old bike fettling game.

The gears being out on a test bike is not such a biggie, the the reason we mention it here though is that it's never happened on a bike from Wiggle before, they pride themselves on how well they prep their bikes before sending them out to customers and review bikes go through the same process… we're guessing that they were just so eager to get their new bike to us that the usual checks got accidently missed. Verenti have assured us that this was a one-off so minor gripe over!  Anyway, things soon started looking up…

Verenti have set out to produce a great value sportive bike and that’s exactly what they’ve achieved here. For a start, the ride position is spot on for racking up the big miles. Slightly shorter than a full-on race bike and quite a bit higher at the front, you can sit aboard the Rhigos for hours without your back screaming for you to pack it in for the day. You’re not so upright that the wind catches you full in the chest, though – it’s a good compromise position, and you can always lower the bars slightly if you like; we had 4cm of headset spacers to play with.

It’s also a smooth ride, the carbon at both ends damping out the vast majority of the buzz from the road and gel pads under the tape around the top section of the bars doing a great job of keeping your palms from going numb. It’s a small detail but it makes such a difference to the ride quality. Verenti’s own cromo-railed saddle isn’t going to give Fizik’s designers sleepless nights but it’s a decent shape and it’s well-cushioned without being squidgy – it’s certainly a useable choice to be going on with.

Hitting the scales at 8.1kg (17.8lb) without pedals (for the XL model), the Verenti comes at a weight that’s easy enough to coax up the hills. Although none of the bikes in the range come equipped with a triple chainset, with a compact (50/34-tooth) double chainset from Truvativ matched up to a 12-27 cassette, you’ve probably got all the gears you need for climbing here. We did stay seated more than usual on the Rhigos, though, because when you get out of the saddle you can’t get over that tall head tube to muscle it around as easily as you can on a standard road bike – so we found ourselves adapting our riding-style slightly. But that makes sense; this is a bike designed for riding all day – you’re better off saving your energy by sitting and spinning.

What goes up must come down, and the Rhigos proves itself to be a confident descender. The head-up riding position certainly helps here, giving you a good view of what’s coming up ahead. Even if you’re down on the bottom of the shallow drop bars, you still get decent visibility, while the 6061 alloy cockpit components from Verenti’s own Me range keep the steering reasonably firm and steady through the tight stuff. The compact chainset means you can run out of gears on the fastest descents but at least you can take a rest in the knowledge that the Me-branded, we'll have a wild stab and say Tektro manufactured, dual pivot brakes are perfectly competent performers.

SRAM Rival levers and mechs take you though the gears swiftly and reliably once you adapt to the Double Tap shift mechanism – a short push to move the chain down the cassette, a longer sweep to move it up a maximum of three sprockets at a time. It functions well as a system, rarely needs adjusting once set up correctly, and it’s lightweight too.

We like the Mavic Aksium wheels as well. They might be the entry level model in the range – but there’s entry level and there’s entry level. The Aksiums don’t have the performance of Mavic’s more expensive offerings, obviously, but they’re still reasonably light and stiff, and they’re tough enough to put up with daily riding without the need for constant TLC.

If we were being hyper-critical, we’d say that the Rhigos doesn’t set the old ticker racing as fast as some similarly priced race-bred machines. It’s a little bit more level-headed than that, a little more sensible, a little bit less seat-of-the-pants exhilarating. But, really, that misses the point. This bike is a marathon runner, not a sprinter. It’s designed to get you round big rides swiftly and comfortably and it does that incredibly well, packing in a whole lot of value in the process.

Verdict

Lightweight and comfortable sportive machine with an excellent spec for the cash – excellent value.