Felt returns with an all-new aero bike: Good on paper, but a let-down in the real world

Felt has been, I think it’s fair to say, in the doldrums for a few years. The brand does have a storied history, having been used by riders as illustrious as Marcel Kittel and Taylor Phinney, and even produced track bikes with left hand drive for the USA Olympic team in 2012.

Now, though, the brand is “in a transition period”; having previously been a part of the KTM group it has since been bought out and the headquarters shipped wholesale to Barcelona. Previously there was an amount of trying to be all things to all people, but now, I am told, the brand is aiming to get back to its roots. No alloy, no cables, just fast carbon race bikes for road and triathlon.

The Felt Nexar, then, is the new Felt’s newest machine, and the first foray for the new owners into the world of modern aero road bikes. Felt very kindly furnished us with a top spec Nexar FRD (Felt Racing Division) for us to test in the wind tunnel, and let me hang onto it for a month or two afterwards to test on my home roads. While it's an admirable first attempt, I think there are too many missteps for it to make it amongst the rarified company of our best road bikes guide.

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Design and aesthetics

Fair play to Felt, it would have been easy to come in with a first new aero bike and play it safe and not rock the boat too much, but instead the Nexar has the hallmarks of many of its up-to-date competitors. It has a high front end, with the aim of allowing riders to maintain an aero position with consistency over a long duration, or at least allow those of us who normally stack a tonne of spacers under the stem to dispense with those for purely aesthetic reasons.

The seat tube, too, is steep, much like the Ridley Noah Fast 3.0, and the rear wheel is shrouded by the seatpost in a way deeply reminiscent of the Cervélo S5. Shorter cranks, as are increasingly de rigueur, have been offset by a ‘greater bottom bracket drop’, though the cranks on my test machine were still a relatively standard 170mm, and the BB drop isn’t anything drastic at 70mm – the Scott Addict RC Ultimate, for example, is 72mm in this regard.

Also, like many of the latest top end aero bikes, attention has been paid to the scales, and the Nexar weighs in at an extremely feathery 6.48kg in a size 54, or in a real world spec as I rode it 7.12kg including pedals, cages, computer mount, 30mm tyres and a load of sealant, and 60mm deep wheels. With this in mind, it’s no great cognitive leap to work out that the Nexar aims to be a one bike solution; a “complete bike for all users”, I was told, and while I was also told by the brand that it is sure it has a WorldTour capable machine, it has been “designed for mortals”.

It is worth noting that my test machine in prototype form came to us with 60mm Vision wheels, whereas the actual sale models ship with 45mm versions. This will have artificially elevated our own wind tunnel testing data, and while Felt’s claims of being ‘within 4 watts of the fastest competitor at 40km/h’ tally with our own findings (in a bike-only test at least), this was tested with deep wheels, not as the bike is sold.

When looking across the range, it is clear that Felt has pinned its colours to two separate masts; those of Shimano – the Nexar will only come with 105, Ultegra (in two guises, with and without a power meter), and Dura-Ace – and Vision, which supplies the wheels. The latter, I think, is great to see; Vision makes excellent wheels and this deep Metron 60 RS set is no different. In only speccing Shimano, very good as the groupsets are, I think Felt is perhaps hamstringing its customers slightly, as I’ll get into later.

There are a few causes for concern in my test machine. It’s worth noting that, due to testing timing, my machine was still very much a prototype, but despite this it could only happily accommodate a 30c tyre (the consequences of which I’ll get onto later), and the brake hoses rubbed the steerer tube with such ferocity on any steering input they produced an audible creak, which was only rectified by dismantling the front end as best I could and physically painting the steerer with grease using a small brush.

Finally, from a design point of view, I found it interesting to learn that the Nexar was also tested with a triathlon cockpit during its development. Felt has a good grounding in the world of Tri racing, so it’s not a huge surprise, and while I’m told it won’t be a spec option at the time of launch, it’s worth noting for later that the swim-bike-run brigade have been considered during development.

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Performance

The Nexar is an aero bike, and as with so many others we have put the hours in and run it through our standard wind tunnel protocol, benchmarking it against our standard test machine, and allowing comparison against a whole host of bikes. We have a deep dive into the results of this bike specifically, so if you are an all-out aero nerd then I’d suggest you go and dive into that, but the top line is this: The Nexar is comfortably in the top third when measured as a bike only, but drops into the bottom half when we stick a Josh Croxton on the top of it, albeit within the noise of the test. Without giving too much away, I will also say that these Vision wheels clearly work with the Nexar very well indeed, as there was a stark difference when we swapped to our stock wheelset, an admittedly shallower, but still very fast set of Enve SES 4.5.

Like many anxious millennials, I am an absolute fiend for a notes app. I have them for everything, from my shopping list to some utterly unintelligible ones like “Twelve 43 Whale Manatee Looking”. Pertinently for this review, I always keep a feedback note for each product I’m testing so I can jot down thoughts on the fly while out on the road. For the Nexar, the first thing I wrote down was as follows:

“Quite scary”

Modern road bikes, even those designed for racing, are almost universally sure-footed nowadays. There are very tangible differences between the likes of a Specialized Tarmac and a Specialized Roubaix, but even the most lively-handling – the likes of the Scott Addict RC and Pinarello Dogma – I would never describe as truly unstable.

The Felt Nexar, though, is quite unnerving to ride in the wrong scenarios. It is not a bike that is totally at ease on unsighted, narrow descents; it’s simply too reactive. Descending was actually quite unpleasant, so much so that the difference was commented on by people I ride with all the time, and to the point that a ride was halted to see if the rear wheel was loose. Would I have had a better time on wide, European or American roads with quality tarmac and sweeping bends? Almost certainly, but I am based in Bristol, not California. Felt’s biggest market is the USA, which is full of wide, predictable roads, and while I didn’t necessarily enjoy my descending time, I can actually see a case for it making more sedate loops feel more engaging.

Part of this is down, I am certain, to a combination of low weight and deep wheels, but I have ridden light race bikes with deep wheels before and not had quite this experience, so it’s not solely that. In only moderate winds, it was very easily perturbed to the point I had to back off on roads I’ve ridden hundreds of times. I have a feeling the tube profiles, which are decidedly old school insofar as they are both very deep and very narrow in a way that puts me in mind of an old rim brake Cervélo S5, aren’t helping in this regard, and catch the wind terribly. Again, I will caveat this with the fact that my testing period was midwinter, where squally gusts barrel in off the Atlantic; not what the designers had in mind, I’d wager.

On flatter and rolling roads where you can lock in and tick the miles out, it’s perfectly pleasant, and while it isn’t the out-and-out most aero bike we’ve ever tested, it’s certainly got the aero credentials to at least be in the conversation among much more established players. The higher front end does mean you can plonk yourself into quite a modern, aero position in relative comfort, and while I didn’t get to ride it for five hours in one go, it never left me with the feelings of fatigue that I often ended rides with after similar stints on the Colnago Y1Rs, for example.

As you can imagine, regarding the reactivity, the cogs span up into motion, and I’ve tried to get to the bottom of what is going on via the geometry charts. The Nexar is most similar to the Ridley Noah Fast 3.0, which is a truly fantastic bike to ride, but it is different in one key way. The same bottom bracket drop, the same chainstay lengths, the same head tube angle, but the Nexar is much shorter in terms of the reach of the frame, resulting in a wheelbase that’s 19mm shorter. The Ridley is responsive and extremely modern, but any twitchy tendencies are moderated by that longer wheelbase, which adds stability and balance.

This was somewhat compounded by the fit of my particular test bike. The short reach of the frame, which is exacerbated by a steeper seat tube angle, would in my opinion be better served with a longer cockpit to better weight the front tyre. This is the case with the Ridley Noah, but here I had to compensate by slamming my saddle all the way rearward, unweighting the front end and reducing cornering confidence. I suspect if I had been able to push my saddle more forward and had a 120mm cockpit, things would have felt tangibly different.

Climbing, considering it’s such an aero-looking machine, is a pretty pleasant affair. It weighs very little after all, but the forward sweep of the bars means for more protracted efforts, you’re stuck with your elbows in a chicken-wing pose, which is decidedly un-aero. Climbing on the tops is becoming deeply unfashionable, however, with more riders choosing to stay in the hoods more often, and it must be said that there is still something really novel about riding a bike that has genuine aero credentials that also goes uphill like many dedicated lightweight bikes do.

When it comes to tyres, the Nexar will officially fit a 32c, but having fit a set of 30c Continental Grand Prix TRs only to discover the rear had worn through the front derailleur cable, I’m slightly sceptical. Perhaps they’d work on more conservative, narrow rims, but I think 30c is your limit, with attention paid to the length of the cable sticking out of your seat tube; again, part of this is also likely down to prototype teething issues, but it’d be remiss of me not to mention it, and it also strikes me that this would be a great bike to fit a 1x SRAM groupset to to free up some tyre capacity at the back, but alas.

Finally, when it comes to sprinting, the rear end has the tendency to leave the ground more readily than any other bike I’ve come across. Again, this must be the product of the short reach of the frame and steep front end, but especially on hilly sprints where your weight naturally shifts even further over the front, it was, sadly, enough of a feature to make me back off at times to maintain traction.

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Value

Pricing for the Nexar, considering the decent aero credentials and very low weight appear to be extremely competitive. The top flight Nexar FRD comes in at $12,599 / €11,399 / £9,899, which undercuts even the Van Rysel RCR-F in a Dura-Ace spec at full price by just over £100.

On the price ticket and weight/aero figures, it looks like an extremely good value machine, but good value isn't just about having a low price... it has to be a good bike too, and I think there are too many drawbacks in terms of handling and the tyre clearance for this to be a true value proposition. You're getting a cheaper bike, but having ridden the RCR-F it's a more attractive proposition as long as you can handle the low front end.

Verdict

For a first foray back into the world of modern aero bikes for a brand trying to reassert itself amongst some very established players, I think the Nexar has done a decent job. Nowadays, many bikes simply live or die by the aero numbers, and in that regard, the Nexar is certainly competitive, especially when you consider the weight of the package. I will say I didn’t personally love the handling characteristics, but I can see riders who really relish extremely fast handling machines, and those whose training roads are flowing and stress-free, having a better time.

Given the triathlon background of the brand, I actually think the Nexar would probably shine for short-course triathlons. The aerodynamics are relatively decent, the low weight would suit hilly courses, and the twitchy nature of the beast would be a lot more manageable not in a large peloton. If you do your racing in Girona, rather than, say, Bolton, the tarmac will be smooth and predictable too, which will also help matters. As a crit racer, too, I think it probably has a place, where tight tracks, frequent hard accelerations and punchy climbs (sometimes) abound.