The Assassin gives you freedom of choice to build your bike to suit your riding and terrain:

• 47mm tyre clearance in both 700c and 650b
• 1x or 2x, up to 50/34
• Dropper post and Di2 jointly compatible
• Front dynamo internal routing
• Fender and rack mounts
• 4 portal bosses + 2 bottles
• Mild, Wild or custom paint

The Assassin’s flip chips are the keys to your personal confidence. Rider preferences on bike handling vary and gravel trails vary even more, so one size does not fit all. The solution is our usage-tailored handling, giving you confidence whether you want to race, explore, tour or shred. This is how we use our custom-building experience of creating bespoke geometry to make a better factory bike.

At the rear, two chips offer three axle positions, adjusting the effective chainstay length and overall wheelbase in 5 mm increments. Go shorter for more agility, go longer for extra stability, or take the middle option if you want a balance of each.

At the front, the chips offer two positions, High and Low. The ‘Low’ position gives a longer trail and slacker head tube angle, suited to more aggressive riding on more challenging terrain; the ‘High’ position creates shorter trail and a steeper head angle, ideal for gravel races or rides on back roads and less rough terrain.

• Long and Low = rugged terrain, more MTB feel, likely on ≥45mm+ tyres
• Short and High = milder gravel, more road bike feel, likely on ≤38mm tyres
• Experiment to find the combination that suits you and your riding best

The Assassin’s flip chips allow you to tailor the handling to suit your riding. They are not designed to offset a switch between 700c and 650b tyres because that can only be done for specific tyres as outer diameters vary with tyre size. What’s more, we firmly believe that a rider on 700x35mm tyres will be on different terrain and want different handling characteristics to a rider on 650x47mm tyres.

And if you just want to stick with one setting, there’s no cost or weight penalty.

Gravel is a broad segment, so we designed the Assassin to cover more of the spectrum than any other bike on sale.

At one end, you have gravel racing and riders exploring back roads and light-duty gravel roads, both wanting something close to a road bike in handling, weight and responsiveness. At the other end, you have riders taking on really tough terrain and wanting a robust bike with the stability to tackle steep, rough trails and singletrack. In between those extremes lie every type of gravel road found the world over, the range of riders discovering them, and the bikepackers setting out to ride them all.

The gravel spectrum is best exemplified by tyre choice: 700c x 35mm slicks at one end, 650b x 47mm at the other. The terrain on which those extremes of tyre choice are ridden demand different geometry. Whereas some bikes seek to maintain a constant trail figure when switching from 700c to 650b wheels, that’s the exact opposite to our goal. The Assassin’s flip chips allow you to tailor the geometry and handling to how and where you ride.

Gravel riders are tackling ever tougher terrain. As well as bigger tyres, this requires suitable geometry. When we say ‘progressive’, we mean that it’s moving further away from all-road/endurance bikes, where gravel started out, and following the path of mountain bikes with slacker head angles and longer trail figures. Stability on rougher terrain, especially when descending, is prioritised over agility.

Like everything, there is a balance to strike here and we believe we have found the sweet spot with the Assassin, using its front and rear flip chips to provide adjustable handling characteristics within a range that covers everything from shredding to racing.

Having refined the geometry options so carefully, we then ensured that the crucial trail figures remain consistent across all frame sizes.

The Assassin is designed around a long top tube/short stem concept, similar to that of modern mountain bikes and in keeping with the progressive, slacker geometry. Reach to the handlebar is maintained while the front centre (BB to front axle) and wheelbase is extended. This increases stability and confidence, especially on rougher descents, and completely eliminates toe overlap in all sizes.

We knew exactly how we wanted the Assassin to ride and our experience and expertise in custom building meant we also knew how to achieve that. The Assassin is made with Toray T1100, 800 and 700 fibres, each deployed according to their relative attributes, resulting in a tough gravel frame that weighs just 1050g, rewards your efforts like a great road bike and provides the comfort you want when the ride is measured in days not hours.

In 1910 the Tour de France tackled the high mountains for the first time, with not one but four high passes in the Pyrenees, including the mighty Col du Tourmalet, in a single stage of over 320 km and 6000m. At that time, every road was gravel and those in the mountains were especially rough.

Summiting the fourth climb, the Col d’Aubisque, eventual stage winner, Octave Lapize, was furious at the stage’s excesses and screamed at the race’s deputy director, Alphonse Steinès, “Vous êtes des assassins! Oui, des assassins!” (You are assassins! Yes, assassins!)

Our gravel bike concurs with Steinès that riding mountains on gravel is, in fact, a fantastic idea and is happy to accept the name given by Lapize – Assassin.

The Assassin has two bottle cage mounts, plus four extra portal mounts on the toptube, downtube and fork legs, and rack mounts, too.

• Rear rack – 15kg
• Front rack – 5kg
• Fork leg mounts – 5kg each