The Vitus Venon Evo is what the brand calls an all-road bike, which can be specced for road riding or off-road duties. In the RS spec tested, it’s designed for endurance road rides, but the 45mm tyre clearance allows Vitus to offer the same frame in fast gravel specs, denoted GR.
Be sure to check out our news story on the Venon Evo for a detailed breakdown of the new bike’s features.
For road riding it’s comfortable, equipped with 28mm Michelin Power Cup slick tyres and the Shimano Ultegra spec reviewed provides plenty of gear range. Swap to wider tyres and there’s balanced, confident off-road handling, making the Vitus Venon Evo a good option if you want one bike to ride different surfaces.
Vitus Venon Evo development
The Venon Evo plugs a gap in Vitus’s range between its race-oriented ZX-1 and Vitesse Evo and its Substance gravel bike.
That’s a space traditionally filled by an endurance bike. But Jodie Shann, senior product manager at Vitus, who headed up development of the new Venon Evo, says that his team saw that the traditional endurance bike category was changing, with larger tyre clearance a key feature.
At the same time, a new performance gravel category was emerging driven by gravel racing in the US and the two categories were merging, with bikes in both categories offering similar geometry.
The Venon Evo looks to have dual personalities, covering the performance gravel category while still being competent on the road, with Vitus labelling it an all-road bike.
Vitus Venon Evo frameset
Take a first glance at the Vitus Venon Evo and you’d peg it for an aero bike. After all, there’s an integrated front end with just a hint of brake hoses showing under the centre of the bars, but quickly disappearing into the underside of the FSA stem. Plus there are the aero bars themselves with their wide, skinny tops.
Shann says that its CFD modelling shows the Venon Evo’s front end to be more aero than the brand’s ZX-1 aero bike thanks to refinements to the head tube shape and a shallower top tube.
But look closer and, despite a comparatively short 132mm head tube on the medium size bike tested, it’s apparent that the handlebar tops are much higher than on most aero bikes. That’s down to the very tall fork crown, with huge clearance around the 28mm tyres and gives the medium bike a 560mm stack.
Vitus has managed to provide wide tyre clearance while keeping the chainstay length down to 420mm, which is impressive. It has achieved this by dropping both the drive side and non-drive side chainstays so that they are anchored at the very bottom edge of the bottom bracket shell.
Shann says that they wanted the Venon Evo not to look out of place in the pro peloton, but to provide everyday versatility, usability and comfort for the enthusiast rider. Vitus also wanted to avoid the bent driveside chainstay seen on many gravel bikes, to give the Venon Evo frameset a more road bike-like profile but still provide the clearance for wide tyres.
The back end of the bike is not aero-profiled and the tubes have a lower volume, so that they are less stiff than the ZX-1 aero bike. Shann says they designed this area to be user-friendly and take a standard 27.2mm round seatpost.
There’s also no shelf behind the bottom bracket shell, which helps avoid mud accumulation when riding off-road. The Venon Evo frameset includes low profile mudguard mounting points and a removable seat stay bridge if you want to set it up for all-weather road rides.
Vitus shows even greater commitment to gravel use with a removable front derailleur hanger. While it offers a range of double chainring road-going builds, all its gravel specs at launch are equipped with SRAM 1x groupsets and 40mm Michelin Power Gravel tyres.
Shann says that the weight of the Venon Evo has been reduced by using a one-piece main frame that saves material, with the review size M bike weighing 7.9kg.
A quality road spec
The test bike is the top road-going spec and equipped with a Shimano Ultegra Di2 12-speed electronic groupset with a wide-range 11-34t cassette and a compact 50/34t chainset sitting in a press-fit bottom bracket.
The 25mm deep Prime Attaquer alloy wheelset comes from Chain Reaction/Wiggle’s in-house Prime component brand. Shann says component supply is still a problem for bike makers, but Vitus expects to offer four specs with deeper section carbon Prime wheels towards the end of 2023. The Attaquer wheels don’t seem like a compromise though; they have a 1,522g claimed weight and feel lively.
They’re also fashionably wide, with a 24.8mm external, 20.6mm internal width that allows the nominally 28mm Michelin Power Cup tyres to hit 29.8mm. The tyres and the wheels are tubeless-ready, but even with the tubes which come fitted, their width meant that I was happy to run the tyres in the mid-60s psi, a boon for comfort on longer rides.
The real plus of the allroad-orientation is the option to swap wheels or tyres for something altogether wider and more aggressive and head off the tarmac.
Vitus claims that there’s space for 45mm tyres, or even more if you’re prepared to eat into the 6mm clearance that this allows around the tyre. There was plenty of clearance with 40mm tyres fitted, although I’d not want to go much wider unless riding ‘proper’ gravel rather than muddy bridleways.
The aero carbon handlebars are also from Prime, namely its Primavera model, as is the round 27.2mm seatpost, while the comfortable, standard length saddle with a central cut-out is from Vitus.
Vitus Venon Evo geometry
The Venon Evo’s stack and reach figures place it midway between the brand’s road-oriented ZX-1 and Vitesse Evo and its Substance gravel bike, despite the shortish head tube.
At 1,019mm for a size M, the wheelbase is also mid-way between a full road bike and many gravel bikes, while the 71.5-degree head tube angle is fairly relaxed for a road machine but on the steeper end of the gravel spectrum.
In theory, swapping to wider tyres will affect handling, as it will alter the trail and the bottom bracket height. In practice, any effect is marginal as the increase in tyre size is compensated by lower pressure, so that the tyre deforms more and the actual rolling diameter is likely to be similar.
The sum of the geometry figures backs up the Venon Evo’s all-road billing. It’s good too to see six sizes offered, catering for a wide range of rider heights.
Riding the Vitus Venon Evo
The Venon Evo is a comfortable perch for longer road rides. The ride position is well balanced, not so stretched out that I suffered from backache and not so upright that too much weight was on the saddle.
You’re sufficiently low to reduce your frontal profile a little, but it’s also easy to ride in the drops for longer periods, both of which will usually count for more than aero frame features in adding some free speed.
Longer, fast descents were comfortable in the drops, with the wide tyres helping to smooth the usual uneven road surfaces well, without adding appreciable drag. At the same time, you can sit up and take in the landscape on more level stretches. It’s a bike that doesn’t feel edgy or intrusive to ride, but equally isn’t sluggish and has the handling and compliance to negotiate the potholes and debris that are part-and-parcel of riding in the UK.
Shimano’s 12-speed Ultegra is a versatile groupset, giving plenty of range. The other good news is that the built-in Bluetooth and ANT+ connectivity and a much improved phone app combine to make configuration easier than with Shimano’s older 11-speed Di2 groupsets and allow pairing with a cycling computer for extra data as you ride.
I like semi-synchronised shifting, which electronic groupsets permit and which helps to keep your cadence similar when you change chainrings. Fully synchronised shifts still feel a little clunky, as you don’t always know when the front change will occur and so may make a front shift under load.
The 11-34t cassette fitted, paired with the compact 50/34t chainset gives you a 1:1 lowest ratio, so hills are less of an effort. I often found that I spun up hills in the lowest gear – good for endurance but less so for climbing speed. For a bike designed for comfort over longer rides, this feels like a sensible compromise and made winching myself back up the Chiltern ridge at the end of a ride a lot easier.
My least favourite part of the Venon Evo was the handlebars. The Prime Primavera bars may look smart and Vitus claims that they improve the aerodynamics, but I found the wide, flat tops slightly uncomfortable.
The trailing edge is quite sharp and the unwrapped tops mean that there’s no extra padding under your gloves, mitts or bare hands. The width of the tops made it difficult to wrap my thumbs around the rear of the bars as well. Anyone with smaller hands than my medium size may find this even more of an issue.
Increasing the bars’ angle of attack from their initial flat positioning helped a little but didn’t completely remedy the problem, and likey undermined their aerodynamic properties in any case.
It’s also worth noting that the short exposed hose length under the centre of the bars makes installing a more chunky out-front computer mount a bit of a struggle, while there’s limited real estate for other bar-mounted accessories such as a light. Gravel specs get different handlebars though.
Heading off road
I also swapped out the supplied tyres for a set of Michelin Power Gravel 40mm tyres, as fitted to the Venon Evo GR spec bikes, and headed onto the still-muddy Chiltern bridleways.
The Venon Evo’s well-chosen ride position works well off-road. It allows you to shift your weight around easily on trickier terrain, while still keeping the front wheel weighted for manoeuvring. Although their tread isn’t the most aggressive, the Power Gravel tyres hold on well in sticky mud and there’s plenty of compliance to help smooth out rougher stretches.
The Venon Evo feels fast handling, without being edgy, and allowed me to negotiate my way around the muddiest sections and other obstacles, while not being a handful on smoother, faster terrain.
The Venon Evo’s 1:1 lowest gear comes in handy off-road, as it does on road climbs, allowing a smooth cadence that avoids wheel slip.
Even with wider tyres, there’s an impressive amount of clearance, particularly around the bottom bracket. I needed to tape the front derailleur Di2 cable to the front of the seat tube to keep it out of harm’s way though, as it was rubbing slightly on the tyres.
If you plan to use the bike with wider tyres as well as on the road, there’s an argument for opting for a SRAM single-ring gravel spec or the two-ring SRAM Rival AXS road spec.
Vitus Venon Evo verdict
The Vitus Venon Evo does a good job of mixing road riding with the trend for heading off-road, with a geometry and spec that’s comfortable for longer road rides. It provides the stable handling and slightly more upright position that makes for comfortable endurance road rides and confident handling off-road.
Building in sufficient clearance for chunky gravel tyres can be tricky without lengthening the chainstays and wheelbase, which can lead to lethargic handling on tarmac, but Vitus has achieved this remarkably well.
The available specs are well chosen for both the gravel rider and the road rider, making for a versatile bike that really can do it all.
Vitus Venon Evo specs
| Price | £4,099.99, $4,599.00, €4,599.99, AU$7,399.99 |
| Brand | Vitus |
| Frame | Venon Evo SL UD Carbon |
| Fork | Venon Evo SL UD Carbon |
| Weight | 7.9kg (size M) |
| Sizes available | XS, S, M, L, XL, XXL |
| Headset | FSA ICR |
| Levers | Shimano Ultegra Di2 R8170 |
| Brakes | Shimano Ultegra Di2 R8170 |
| Rear derailleur | Shimano Ultegra Di2 R8150 |
| Front derailleur | Shimano Ultegra Di2 R8150 |
| Crankset | Shimano Ultegra R8100, 50/34t |
| Bottom bracket | Shimano PF86 |
| Cassette | Shimano Ultegra R8100, 11-34 |
| Chain | Shimano Ultegra R8100 |
| Wheels | Prime Attaquer alloy |
| Tyres | Michelin Power Cup Classic TS TLR, 28mm |
| Bars | Prime Primavera aero carbon |
| Stem | FSA NS SMR alloy |
| Seatpost | Prime Primavera 27.2mm carbon |
| Saddle | Vitus Race Performance |
