The Rundown: A loaded mailbag this week: how to actually win the best all-around rider competition without racing 50 times a year, how to spec a cost-effective gravel groupset, and a sobering reminder about why a camera on your bike matters. Plus a 100-mile coast ride on the calendar, a van that picked the worst possible morning to die, and the Vuelta heating up. Still here, still riding, still making a podcast.
Backpedal: new bikes, a crit double, and a van down by the on-ramp
Ian is loving his new Factor Ostro VAM, built up with SRAM RED, and the verdict matches what everyone says about that bike: it just wants to go forward, quiet and snappy, a real step up from his old aero rig. Both he and Jake now have one. The team had a strong showing at the Sauvie Island shootout, five Dialed riders in a 40-to-50-strong masters bunch rolling 27 to 28 miles an hour around the island, neutralized at one point by a tractor. Lance owned up to a center-line pass at a sprint point that earned him a deserved earful, and a sincere apology afterward. The day before, Dickie Mallison and the CC crowd put on a Canby Ferry ride that was equal parts fun and fast.
Lance also raced two Portland criteriums, upgrading to a 3 specifically to help teammate Chris Surratt and to beat a rival in the season-long best all-around rider chase. The tight downtown crit suited his bike handling; the Lloyd Center course, with its parking-tunnel passage and long straights, dropped him. Then the van. Sunday morning, a mile from home on the way to the Lloyd crit, the transmission let go, no gears, no park, no e-brake, rolled to rest in a vacant driveway chocked with a rock from the ditch. An $11,000 transmission job later, it is still at the mechanic. Jake's two weeks were a Penn State daughter drop-off, switching to direct Alaska flights through Newark to cut the trip from a 14-hour ordeal to ten hours, and spotting head coach James Franklin strolling past his daughter's dorm. Matt, as ever, is buried in cross country.
Best all-around rider: how to play the BAR
The first listener question, from Chris: how do you maximize best all-around rider points without the time or money for 50-plus races a year? The BAR rewards versatility across OBRA's seven disciplines, gravel, mountain bike, road, short track, time trial, criterium, and cyclocross, and the single biggest lever is simply doing at least one race in every discipline, since most contenders never manage all seven. Points run 15 down to 1 for a top-15 finish in your category, tallied into a placing per discipline, then summed across disciplines, so showing up in a thin field can be worth as much as a hard-won result in a stacked one.
The strategy the guys landed on: target less-crowded weekend races where a top-15 is realistic, since weekday races do not count, and stay locked to a single category, because getting catted up mid-season turns an easy podium into a fight just to crack the top 15. Ian won the masters BAR a couple years back partly by pulling on his big-boy pants for a cyclocross race he only entered for the points, helped by a thinly-populated age group. Lance laid out this year's live drama: he is locked in third after getting catted up in mountain biking, while teammate Chris Surratt is defending a narrow masters lead that will come down to cyclocross. The guys' real takeaway, beyond the tactics, was that OBRA should make a far bigger deal of the BAR; a season-long versatility competition deserves more than a footnote and a water bottle.
Best value gravel groupset
The second question, from Carm in North Vancouver, BC: building an Orbea Terra all-road frame, what is the most cost-effective wireless setup across SRAM Force and Rival 13-speed XPLR? The guys' consensus was to spend where it counts and save where it does not. Put the money into the Force shifters and hoods: better ergonomics, better texturing, stronger braking, the extra control button, and the newer easier bleed system, all for a few hundred dollars more than Rival. Everything functional that used to be RED-only now lives in Force, so there is no need to climb to RED unless you want the weight savings.
From there, mix down to Rival on the parts where the difference is mostly grams, not function: cranks, chain, and cassette perform near-identically, so unless you are racing and chasing weight, take the savings. Where they pushed back on the spec was gear range. The 13-speed XPLR tops out around a 10-46, which can leave you mashing on long, steep climbs; if you climb a lot, a mullet setup with an Eagle or a transmission rear derailleur and a 10-52 is worth considering. As Lance put it, he has never met a gear he did not like. The honest answer for an all-road bike that will see a lot of miles: save on the drivetrain, splurge on the hoods, and keep the gears.
Champ's corner: the Vuelta, Leadville, and Gravel Worlds
The Vuelta was a few stages in and recorded spoiler-light for Ian. UAE took the team time trial by eight seconds over Visma Lease a Bike, and Jonas Vingegaard moved into the red jersey as the clear favorite, with Matteo Jorgenson, Sepp Kuss, and the irrepressible Victor Campenaerts, whose team-bus vlogs are must-watch, riding support. Juan Ayuso was biding his time amid his messy exit from UAE. At Leadville, Keegan Swenson won for the fifth straight year, three minutes off his own course record in dry, slow, headwind conditions, with skimo standout John Gaston second again; Kate Courtney won the women's race and broke the course record by 11 minutes off a recently broken hand. At Gravel Worlds in Nebraska, unexpected peanut-butter mud turned it into a tire-clearance battle, and Matt Beers out-sprinted Keegan Swenson at the line.
One last thing: put a camera on your bike
The close turned serious. Ian shared that one of his coaching clients was nearly killed by a driver who, by the account he heard, followed the rider off the road into a pull-out and made a deliberate high-speed close pass, then fled on false plates. A following Tesla driver chased down the plate on dash cam and came back to check on him. The rider was not hit but is deeply shaken. The guys turned it into a plea: dehumanizing cyclists as objects rather than people is how this happens, and the single best protection is a camera. A Garmin Varia setup, the RCT715 radar with camera or the Varia Vue headlight with camera, gives you both visibility to traffic and the footage to hold a driver accountable. Weight does not matter next to that.
On lighter notes, Matt reviewed the COROS Nomad and Suunto Race 2 watches, and noted that even memory-in-pixel displays still have a real place against the AMOLED trend for outdoor visibility and battery life. Lance and Ian are riding to Astoria with Dickie Mallison's birthday group, about 100 miles to the coast, and cyclocross season kicks off in a week and a half with Het Meer and the Harvest series. Jake is taking a rare quiet Labor Day to catch up at home.
That is 373. A masterclass in working the BAR, a sensible way to spec a gravel bike, and a reminder to ride defended and ride seen. The guys will be back as cross season gets rolling.
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