Marin Gestalt 3

The Marin Gestalt 3 is a rugged road bike with an aluminium frame that provides an entertaining ride across a variety of different surfaces, although its weight hampers progress a little when you hit the climbs.

Marin categorises the Gestalt 3 as a 'Beyond Road' bike, and that's a good description of what it's suited to. You get an endurance geometry with a SRAM 1x drivetrain, hydraulic disc brakes and 30mm wide Schwalbe S-One tyres (more on all that in a mo). The result is a bike that enjoys steaming along the gravel or flicking through the trees as much as it likes to get busy on tarmac while commuting to and from the office.

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I've enjoyed this bike most on rolling gravel roads where you can wind it up to serious speeds, and it's more than capable of taking on a bit of dirt too. I've been riding the Gestalt 3 over the summer months when the bridleways around my way have been mostly firm or just a little bit gloopy, and hitting them fast has been a whole lot of fun. Switching direction to get the best line is usually a cinch and the ride is planted enough that you don't get knocked around by every little irregularity that comes your way.

One of the Gestalt 3's key features is the SRAM Rival 1 drivetrain with a 42-tooth chainring and a 10-42-tooth cassette. This gives you a very wide range of gears – and, as a single setup, there's no duplication, obviously.

The lowest gear is really small at under 27 inches. If you're not nerdy enough for that to mean anything to you, it's smaller than you get with a compact chainset and an 11-32 cassette. Do you need a gear that small on the road? Maybe not, but I found that it encouraged me to take on ridiculously steep off-road climbs. You see a mountain bike trail heading up through the woods, you think that you might as well give it a crack. Nothing ventured, nothing gained. So you head up and find yourself riding new stuff, and that's nearly always A Good Thing.

Admittedly, at 9.9kg (21.8lb) the Gestalt 3 isn't mega-lightweight, and you're occasionally aware of that ballast on the hills, but the low gearing offsets that to a degree. Grip is actually more of a limiting factor on climbs. The Schwalbe S-One 30mm tyres (check out our review here) are absolutely superb on gravel and towpaths where they just zing along, but they're too smooth to offer much traction when the ground isn't firm and they'll struggle for purchase on steep sections of dirt. Get out of the saddle and your wheels will sometimes just spin. Fair enough, these tyres aren't designed to offer much off-road grip.

Like the Maddux/Formula wheels, they're tubeless compatible. Set things up that way and you can run low pressures for more grip without running the risk of a pinch flat.

If you do find yourself heading off piste on a regular basis, you can always swap to knobblier rubber. I tried a few different tyres and found that anything up to 35mm will fit just fine. If you stick with 30s you'll be able to fit mudguards too. The Gestalt 3 comes with eyelets both front and rear along with rack eyelets at the back too.

We imagine that many people will take advantage of those, whether that be for commuting or adventuring. The reality is that although some people are lucky enough to have a bike for every occasion, the rest of us need something that's capable of doing several different jobs, and the Gestalt 3 is certainly a versatile performer.

I've mentioned the lowest gear the SRAM 1x drivetrain offers; at the other end of the scale, the 42-tooth chainring and the 10-tooth sprocket give you a top gear of about 113 inches. That's not as big as you get with a compact chainset and an 11-tooth sprocket, say, but it's bigger than a compact and a 12-tooth sprocket. It's unlikely that you'll run out of gears when riding off-road. It might not sound especially fast but 35-40mph feels it when you throw lumps, bumps and sketchy corners into the equation. I've got some quick gravel descents close to me and I've rarely felt undergeared on those. You might occasionally find yourself spinning out on the tarmac. If you do, well, you can just sit and enjoy the scenery for a minute, can't you?

The SRAM Rival hydraulic disc brakes provide all the power you can handle and, more to the point, enough control to keep you safe over rough and slippery terrain. Whether your hands are on the hoods or the drops, you get excellent lever feel so you can push yourself in the knowledge that scrubbing off speed is always going to be straightforward enough without much danger of locking up.

The Gestalt's riding position is a little more upright than I like but, on the other hand, it might be exactly what you're after. Horses for courses. We have the 58cm model in for review with a 550mm seat tube (shortened by a sloping top tube) and a 585mm effective top tube (measured horizontally rather than along the tube itself). The head tube is 190mm. The stack (the vertical distance from the centre of the bottom bracket to the top of the head tube) is 618mm and the reach (the horizontal distance between those points) is 396mm.

> Read our guide to the best adventure/gravel bikes

I took the headset spacers out and the front end still wasn't low enough for me, so I flipped the stem so that it was angled downwards too – but then, I have a background in triathlon where every degree above horizontal is a degree too high! If you take a more relaxed approach, a setup like this might be what you're after, especially if you like to take on more technical riding where a better view and a more central weight distribution will definitely come in handy.

The Marin's comfort goes beyond that relaxed setup. You have those 30mm Schwalbe S-One tyres that you can run tubeless at low pressures if you like, and the sloping top tube means that you're likely to have plenty of slim (27.2mm) seatpost extending out of the frame. As ever, the saddle is going to be a matter of taste but I found Marin's own Endurance Concept Elite to be a decent shape with enough padding to soften the jaggedy bits of road.

And in conclusion...

Overall, the Marin Gestalt 3 is a capable rugged road bike with a lot to offer. There are livelier options out there if you want a bike solely for gravel blasts, but it's certainly worth considering if you're after something versatile enough to be a weekday workhorse and a weekend adventurer.

Verdict

A very capable aluminium rugged road bike that's versatile enough for weekday commuting and weekend adventures