Pinarello

Gan 105 Road Bike

Pinarello's Gan hardly deserves association with the term "entry-level", however, such is its position in the hierarchy of the multiple Grand Tour winning, luxury brand. Pinarello has largely owned the top step of multi-week stage racing for the better part of a decade and simultaneously evolved its flagship Dogma to steer riders to victory. When Pinarello designs the Gan, you can bet it's influenced by top-tier race-winning technology, and the current Gan models itself after the Dogma F8, which was a class-leading bike not so many years ago.

Beginning with the frame, which is unmistakably Pinarello in silhouette and design, it uses T600 carbon for less stiffness and more compliance to push the racing bike towards an endurance riding character more than the stiff, high-modulus carbon of the Dogma. It's not a weakness, but more of a trade-off to provide greater comfort to the majority of riders. The trademark asymmetric frame is a bit more subdued, and the Gan registers a bit heavier on the scale than the Dogma, but we feel only the experienced cyclist and avid hill climber could record this as a performance handicap.

Other bits trickled down to the Gan manifest in the Flatback tube shaping, which is the result of in-depth CFD analysis to discover the most versatile aerodynamic tube shapes. A cross-section of FlatBack tubes reveals an ovalized face paired with an abruptly truncated trailing edge. Pinarello claims that this shape manages the detachment of turbulent lamina at multiple yaw angles, reducing the drag effect of dead air in the tubes' wake at the 5 - 20° angles that we typically ride and race in.

Final touches like internal cable routing and an Italian threaded bottom bracket demonstrate Pinarello's dedication to incorporating only the best frame design elements in its racing bikes. It's hard to imagine anything but universal accord over the bottom bracket choice, as it eliminates the creaks and imperfect tolerances created by PressFit designs.

With confidence in its reliable performance and ease of maintenance, Pinarello equips the Gan with Shimano's 105 groupset and rim brakes for a touch of increasingly rare tradition.