The Sportiva Carbon Frame 

The Ribble Sportiva Carbon Women’s bike is designed to be a comfortable enough ride for all day adventures, but the geometry and carbon lay-up have been manipulated to provide enough stiffness and liveliness to ensure the ride isn’t deadened by the extra compliance.

Ribble describe the wheelbase as being short to provide extra nippiness. Any such claims will always need to be placed on a scale – but the 48” size I tested had a wheel base of 982mm, about the same as my own fairly quick footed race bike.

The top tube tapers nicely as it reaches the seat tube, and skinny seat stays meet fairly low beneath the seat tube, creating a wide junction which would certainly go a way to dampening out road buzz. The downtube is still pretty chunky though, as is the area around the BB86 bottom bracket, offering assurance of a sprightly ride.

Ribble have also built the bike to suit a female form. We cringed a little at the description on their website: “Women have proportionally longer legs but shorter torso and arms than your average male.” The whole long legs/short torso argument is pretty outdated. However, when we asked for more information, we were got a much more detailed explanation and one we’re pretty on board with.

James Dove, a director at Ribble, told us: “It’s not that long ago that a ‘women’s bike’ was simply a bike with a step through down tube.  Those women looking for a ‘serious’ road bike typically would end up riding a men’s or unisex bike. While riding a unisex bike is in most cases no means a problem for women, there are a few instances where it is harder to get the fit right.  From fitting a large number of customers over the years – we still do so in our Preston shop – we typically find women have a shorter reach than men – especially in the arm length.”

This explanation marries up to what we’ve been told by Specialized and Canyon, both of whom claim to have carried out extensive research. Jim went on to say: “Traditionally this [shorter reach] was simply solved by fitting a shorter stem and moving the saddle position slightly.  However, the Sportiva carbon features a shorter overall reach.  What this means is we don’t have to a compromise handling performance when fitting a shorter stem to the bike.  There comes a point where a shorter stem can deliver a twitchy ride which isn’t the sort of riding experience you want for the customer.”

This explanation made sense to us, and we were excited to see what the frame would offer in terms of ride quality. As you’d expect, the frame and fork are both carbon, and we’re told different grades of carbon – Toray T700 and T800 – are blended to offer stiffness where it’s wanted and compliance elsewhere. All cable routing is internal, and the frame has clearance for 25mm tyres as well as being compatible with both electronic and mechanical gearing systems.

The process

This is where buying online has the potential to unravel. Delivery of the bike. So much can go wrong from screen to front door, how would Ribble perform here?

The bike arrived with me well packaged and carefully wrapped to prevent damage in transit. ‘Building it’ was as simple as turning the bars, fitting the separately supplied seat post and saddle,  and adding pedals. So far so good.

A turn of the pedals as I shifted gears, however, revealed a problem. The chain clattered around in the rear cassette and tick-tick-ticked at me incessantly instead of crisply shifting. Badly indexed gears can ruin a ride, and I’m sad to say that these were badly indexed. Thankfully, a few tweaks of the gear cable had the shifting down to perfection and we were good to go.

This does present a complication. I know what bad set up feels like and I know it’s easy to fix. Someone buying a first bike might not have that knowledge, which would probably result in a trip to the local bike shop and a tail between the legs request for them to fix the bike you bought online. Ribble do however promise that this would be a rare occurrence, and that they could fix problems in their Preston store, or would foot the bill for any required tweaks.

Everything else, however, was perfect – the brakes were set up to within a millimetre of perfection, saddle (which I promptly swapped after one ride) was fitted to the seat post. The tyre logos almost matched up to the Mavic logos, though if we’re being picky they were a bit off centre.