Dolan GXA Aluminium Disc Gravel Bike

The quick handling of Dolan's GXA gravel bike makes it a blast for whizzing round on dirt roads, but that handling and a conventional stock handlebar make it less suited for anything trickier.

If you're interested in the Dolan GXA, read our guide to the best gravel bikes for more choices, at various prices.

Ride & handling

The GXA's handling is, depending on your taste, either responsive or a bit twitchy. I wanted it to be steadier when I was following the ruts on the ancient Worsted Way, my local Roman road, but I was glad of its agility when switching lines on the permanently-wet bridleway that drops from the ridge to Linton with its excellent cake shop.

> Buy now: Dolan GXA gravel bike for £1,699 from Dolan

At speed on easy surfaces, the GXA zooms along nicely. Grab it by the scruff of the neck and show it who's boss, with a firm hand on descents and a proper monstering in corners, and you soon find its sweet spot. With road tyres or a multi-surface tyre like the Vittoria Terreno Zero or Terreno Dry it'd be great for eating up summer miles on back lanes and forest roads.

But it does tend to wander at low speeds. Climbing on narrow singletrack requires constant course corrections, which can get irritating. On the other hand, you can exploit this trait on semi-technical trails because it allows you to change direction in an instant as you play Hunt The Line on steep climbs. Swings, roundabouts.

One problem is that the Deda RHM handlebar fitted as standard is just too narrow and has no flare, so switching to the drops for maximum control when things get tricky just doesn't help. I took advantage of the weather this week to get out for a spin in the snow (I love off-road riding in snow, it's just so silly), but I ended up on my arse several times, with two days of aches and pains to remind me that I'm not a rubber 25-year-old any more. Ibuprofen FTW. There are plenty of options to customise the build, though, including a gravel bar for more money – more on that later.

The GXA's head angle is 72 degrees, which is on the steep side by modern gravel standards. A shallower head angle might well calm the handling.

Braze-ons

The GXA isn't quite as festooned with mounting points as some gravel bikes, but it still has plenty. There are three pairs of bottle bosses (two in the usual places plus one under the down tube), mounts for rack and mudguards, and a pair on the top tube for a snack box.

Oddly, the fork has no mounts for the mini-racks many lightweight bikepackers favour. Dolan offers a £100 upgrade to the Dolan GXA Carbon Gravel Adventure Fork with three bolts on each leg, which seems like quite a bit of money for six threaded inserts.

Groupset

The GXA is available in various builds, at various prices, including Shimano 105 for £1,599.98, GRX 810 and 2x11 gears for £2,199.98, GRX Di2 for £3,399.98 and a touring bike version with 105 Di2 for £2,299.99, with options to customise each build further.

This Shimano GRX RX600 1X11 HDR model on test has a mix of GRX components: an RD-RX812 rear derailleur, ST-RX600 brake/shift levers, BR-RX400 brakes and RX600 chainset. It's all eminently functional stuff.

The gears click into place with the usual Shimano aplomb and the brakes have plenty of easily controlled stopping power.

For more on GRX see Mike Stead's in-depth review from 2020. I can't find anything to disagree with there, though it's a pity Mike's prediction of more gear options hasn't materialised.

Gearing

For this build Dolan has gone for the single-chainring version of Shimano's GRX components, combining a 40-tooth chainring with an 11-42 cassette. This just isn't a big enough gear range for the wide variety of terrain this bike can tackle.

> How to get ultra-low gearing for gravel bike adventures

I found myself struggling up anything steeper than a 10 per cent grade; yes, it's doable, but it's no fun. The 14 per cent section of my steepest local bridleway hurt, and that's in Cambridgeshire ferchrissakes. I can't imagine toiling up a long, steep section in the Dales or Quantocks with this gearing.

Single-chainring gear systems have come to gravel bikes from mountain biking, where SRAM’s gert huge-range cassettes make sense. When you're talking a 34-tooth chainring with a 12-speed, 10-52 range out back, that still gives you a really low bottom gear and sacrifices the high end. But on a gravel bike you want range: a high top gear for road descents and a low gear for off-road that really needs to be almost as low as a mountain bike's.

You just can't do that with the current 1x11 systems from either Shimano or SRAM. You get an 11-42 option from Shimano and a somewhat better 10-42 cassette from SRAM, but SRAM blows it by offering a 40-tooth chainring as the smallest option in Force 1, Rival 1 and Apex 1, same as Shimano GRX.

The good news as far as Dolan is concerned is that you can choose a double-chainset version of the GRX groupset for just another £100, which lands you a 30x34 low gear and the possibility of going lower still by fitting an 11-40 or even 11-42 cassette (per Shimano they're not supposed to work, but they can be persuaded to with careful adjustment).

Finishing kit

The standard spec of the GXA includes the Deda RHM handlebar fitted here. It's a rightly well-regarded handlebar for road riding, with careful shaping that makes it easy to switch positions. However, it's very much a standard road shape with no flare and a 130mm drop. If you want a flared bar then Dolan will fit a Deda Gravel 100 bar and stem, but that's an extra £100.

The stock bar really holds the GXA back. I improved things a little by flipping the stem to raise the bar as far as it would go, lifting the drops so that I could use them comfortably on descents and when zooming round the woods, but I still wanted them wider. Dolan should really fit the Gravel 100 as standard.

I was pleasantly surprised by the Selle Italia X1 Flow saddle, as comfy a place to park my bum as any I've used, and narrow enough to facilitate moving around on the bike, which you do more of when riding away from the tarmac. For an inexpensive seat, it's startlingly good.

It's supported by an Alpina seatpost that provides fine adjustment of saddle angle with a cradle comprising two curved pieces, held secure by a pair of bolts. Nothing remarkable, but it works.

Tyres on our build are 700 x 43 Panaracer Gravel King SK, though these are a £69.98 upgrade over the Continental Ultra Sport III that are the standard spec. Fitted to Mavic Allroad wheels, the Gravel King SKs measure bang on 43mm; there's room for something much bigger, though Dolan conservatively rates the frame as only having space for 45mm tyres in 700C, or 50mm in 650B.

The grip and versatility of the Gravel King SKs makes them a long-standing road.cc favourite. They really enhance the Dolan GXA, providing secure grip on pretty much any surface except deep mud. There's not much of that round here but they worked well on sandy and gravelly trails and dirt roads, loamy singletrack and various rock-strewn tracks. They were even pretty decent on fresh snow.

Value

The GXA is very good value for money compared with many of its rivals.

The Cube Nuroad EX we reviewed in October has a similar spec for £1,649, with a flared bar and steadier handling, but some other competitors are a lot more expensive.

You can pay £2,200 for a Specialized Diverge Elite E5, for example, or £2,000 for Scott's Speedster Gravel 20; both have double chainsets so are more comparable to the double-clanger version of the GXA, which is another £100 and still plenty cheaper than the Scott or Specialized.

Conclusions

I find myself a bit ambivalent about the Dolan GXA. For a start it's not, as Dolan bills it, 'the ultimate gravel bike'. Rather, with its conventional handlebar and 72-degree head angle, it's more like a fat-tyre road bike or an old school touring bike, albeit with quicker handling than touring bikes typically have.

That's no bad thing, but it does narrow the situations that best suit the GXA. It's a bike for exploring tiny, crumbling lanes with grass down the middle, forest roads and easy trails, and it's very good value for money.

Who should buy the Dolan GXA?

Although Dolan bills the GXA as a gravel bike, its handling and conventional handlebar make it a bit of a sheep in wolf's clothing in this spec, especially if you don't choose the upgrade to the Gravel King SK tyres. However, you'd be better off buying the base spec and fitting multi-purpose tyres rather than pure knobbies, which would make the GXA a versatile back-road explorer.

If that's your intended use then the GXA is a good choice. With road tyres it works just as well as a club run bike as it does as a dirt roader with knobbies. In fact it's the sort of bike that almost insists you have two pairs of wheels for it so you can quickly and easily switch between tarmac and dirt.

Verdict

Good all-rounder best suited to bad tarmac and dirt roads rather than technical trails