All-change for new flagship road group, but what about discs? This article originally appeared on BikeRadar

Following up on our recent exposé on the upcoming 2013 Shimano Dura-Ace mechanical and Di2 groups comes some new insider information on what SRAM apparently has planned for the next generation of its flagship Red group. Even if just a portion of this information is correct, it seems that MY2013 is rapidly heating up for high-end road customers.

According to Cyclingnews’ exclusive sources, SRAM’s next-gen Red group will stick with its current 10-speed configuration but that’s about the only thing that’s unchanged.

First and foremost is a new DoubleTap lever body shape, which will supposedly sprout a more pronounced knob up front to provide a more secure handhold – similar to what Campagnolo does with its Ergopower levers based on what we’ve been told – along with customizable gel padding beneath the hoods that will allow riders to tune the feel of their controls.

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Two Giant bicycles are featured in the October 2010 issue of Bicycling magazine.  The Giant TCX 0 is reviewed on page 69, and, since ‘cross season is starting soon, it might be a good idea to get a copy of this magazine and check out the full review by Bicycling’s “Fit Chick” contributor and test editor, Selene Yeager. 

Here are some highlights of her review: “We put this bike to the test in every muddy mixture imaginable, from the highly adherent peanut-butter variety to muck more like Crisco.  The Giant stood up admirably to even the worst of cross conditions thanks to its smart spec.” 

She goes on to say: “The snappy, light aluminum frame punched quickly out of turns and got up to speed superfast on long straight-aways.  Handling is primarily stable—the geometry is less about snap than about holding a line at all times, even on slick, zigzagging descents, which makes the TCX 0 a pleasure to race in even the most unpleasant circumstances.” 

In the same issue, the Giant for Women Avail Advanced 2 is spotlighted in the magazine’s popular “What Bike Should I Buy” feature on page 82.  A reader from Denver, named Maureen, writes Bicycling asking for help finding a bike that fits both her charity-ride schedule and her $2000 dollar budget. 

Bicycling editor Christine Bucher picks the Giant for Women Avail Advanced 2.   Part of her praise for the bike reads this way: “The frame is built for women: The sloped top tube not only reduces standover height, but it also lightens the bike and adds stiffness to help Maureen make the most of her power.”  The feature also notes the distinctive design, color, and graphics of the bike, saying: “A teardrop-shaped seat tube with a cutout for the rear wheel, an aero seatpost and subtle graphics make the Avail Advanced stand out on any group ride.”

The alloy Anthem X is one of the few bikes that totally dominates its class. Very few 100mm-travel rides come close on performance, and none do on speed for spend. The brand-new carbon fibre Advanced adds an extra dose of the X-factor for those lucky enough to be able to afford it.

Ride & handling: Short travel and extra bulk enable you to command the trail

Provided by www.bikeradar.com

The Anthem’s handling has always set it apart, but Giant’s testers weren’t happy with the results until they halved the weight difference and massively increased front-end stiffness.

They’re not joking, either – the short-travel tapered steerer fork and massively oversized front end put pinpoint precision right into the palms of your gloves.

On every ride, we blitz down to the singletrack in eager anticipation, carving and screaming through every recently dried corner in a shower of roost. This bike gets your bars on the deck, tyres sliding, and your neck straining round looking for the next berm or lip.

In fact, the Advanced SL 1 and the alloy Anthems make a complete mockery of the overweight 100mm-travel bikes that claim they’re designed that way for a more aggressive feel on the trail.

Frames with100mm of travel just don’t get any sharper, snappier, more sure-footed or more addictively agile than the Advanced SL 1. We’re not surprised that Giant Pro racers Oli Beckingsale and Adam Craig have fitted their bikes with QR15 screw-through axle forks to create the ultimate steering machines

Any worries you might have about wheel or brake weight will be left as far behind as other riders, too; the traction control of the Maestro rear suspension rips a hole in any race pack or social ride.

Immediate acceleration, outstanding handling balance and pinpoint accuracy replace brake dabs with pedal stabs. Every slight ripple or lip becomes a kicker or carving hook that will help you sculpt maximum speed and entertainment from the trail.

Though you’ll need to back off across big rocks, you’ll be amazed at what 100mm of well-controlled travel can cope with. While our fork sample is notchy over small bumps, its control down steps and technical descents under hard braking is outstanding. The cornering abilities are no different.

The back end sucks up drops and lets you manual through mayhem without losing composure. Short travel means no wallow, hesitation or big changes in handling, letting you put the hammer down again immediately with only the low bottom bracket occasionally interrupting pedalling.

All in all, the Advanced SL 1 is an astonishingly accurate, inspiringly agile and well-controlled ride.

Frame & equipment: Contact SLR bars stand out from the crowd

Aside from the material, the biggest structural change between the alloy Anthem and carbon Advanced SL is the use of a tapered overdrive head tube. There’s also an absolutely massive box-section down tube and oversized press-fit bottom bracket. In contrast, the triangular top tube tapers from a huge 65 x 45mm to 45 x 30mm ahead of the slightly extended seat tube.

The single-piece carbon rear end is also bulked up in terms of tube dimensions, although curved stays keep ankle clearances safe and you’ll still be able to squeeze a 2.25in tyre in. Dropouts and lower linkages are alloy, while the top rocker gets the full carbon treatment.

Long-haul riders and night racers using bottle batteries will be pleased to see belly as well as down tube bottle mounts. The bolts are red and anodised to match the headset covers, grip collars and spoke nipples.

While the 9.9kg, £5,950 Advanced SL 0 is a full SRAM XX race screamer, Giant have taken a very simple ‘open a box of XT over it’ approach to the SL 1. On the plus side, that means trail-tough wheels and powerful brakes, but they could certainly have gone a lot lighter and racier. The recent move to Maxxis CrossMark tyres gets a thumbs up too.

If the supplied spec bothers you, you can always build your own from Giant’s Advanced SL frame kit. But, at £2,500, it’s not the cheapest way to go. There’s only a £1,200 price difference between the similarly specced alloy and carbon X1 bikes compared to a £1,505 discrepancy between the framesets.

Back to the bike, and Fox’s 100mm forks are much lighter this year. Every Anthem X in the range – right down to the £1,400 X4 – gets a Fox fork and shock as standard. Giant’s Connect and Contact homebrew kit is rapidly establishing a great reputation with our testers, too, and we’re particularly impressed with the Contact SLR carbon bars.Good bars and tyres are at a premium on a bike as fine as the Advanced. The story goes that Giant actually intended – and initially built – the carbon frame to be 400g lighter than the alloy one

With a talented roster of world class cyclocross racers on its new Rabobank-Giant Off-Road Team, plus a new series of 2011 ’cross bikes including an all-new TCX and the TCX Advanced SL composite bike, Giant is placing more emphasis than ever on its commitment to cyclocross.

Earlier this year Giant launched a new global off-road team with a dual focus on endurance mountain biking and cyclocross. Now, with the fall ’cross season approaching, Giant is introducing a new line of cyclocross bikes including the TCX Advanced SL that will be raced by team riders including World Cup contenders Gerben de Knegt and Bart Aernouts of The Netherlands.

The new TCX Advanced SL marks the culmination of a development project that began more than 18 months ago when Giant first partnered with the Rabobank Professional Cycling Team. Shortly after Giant and Rabobank joined forces, Giant’s product development team met with Rabobank ’cross racers including Lars Boom—who was the Elite Men’s World Cyclocross Champion at the time—to begin the process of creating a new World Cup-level ’cross bike.

“The Rabobank team has very deep roots in cyclocross,” said Giant Global Product Development Director Dennis Lane. “With riders like Boom, de Knegt and lots of other developing stars in Europe, they asked us to come up with a bike that would give them a real edge at the World Cup and World Championship level.”

The heart of the new frameset is Giant’s Advanced SL composite material. Starting with T-800 raw carbon fiber, Giant weaves its own composite at its renowned C-Tech composite engineering facility to produce a superlight, stiff and compliant frame sharing the same DNA as the road and TT frames raced by Rabobank road pros.

The next, and perhaps most important step in the development of the TCX Advanced SL, was determining tube shape through Finite Element Analysis (FEA). Generally speaking, the TCX Advanced SL features smaller-diameter tubes than Giant’s composite road bikes. This results in a more compliant, ride-tuned feel the Rabobank ’cross pros asked for. It makes for a better-handling bike, one that “flows” through the tight corners and constantly changing terrain of cyclocross.

The TCX Advanced SL’s Integrated Seatpost, a signature feature of Giant’s pro-level road bikes, is engineered with a bit more compliance than Giant road bikes. There’s less emphasis on aerodynamics, more on comfort. And of course the TCX Advanced SL frameset takes into consideration the elements of ’cross racing. Plenty of rear wheel clearance helps shed mud, and internal cable routing ensures crisp, precise shifts no matter how adverse the conditions.

The TCX Advanced SL does incorporate some of the performance features of Rabobank’s pro road bikes. The Overdrive headtube and fork steerer, with 1-1/8-inch top and 1-1/4-inch bottom bearings, is super stiff for razor sharp handling; when paired with a composite fork for a compliant feel on rough surfaces and harsh transitions, it offers an unparalleled performance ride.

2011 Giant ‘Cross Lineup Includes The Made-For-Women TC W….Check Them Out

As part of its expanded commitment to cyclo-cross, Giant is proud to introduce the 2011 TCX W, the first made-for-women cyclocross bike from a major brand. Designed and developed with input from Giant Factory Off-Road Team rider Kelli Emmett, who raced prototype versions of the bike last fall, the new TCX W will be available to consumers this summer.

Like all Giant women’s bikes, the TCX W adheres to Giant’s Five Point design philosophy. Five Point is essentially a product checklist that focuses on five key elements: Sizing, Styling, Construction, Geometry and Components.

The TCX W project started more than a year ago. Emmett and Giant women’s product developer Abby Cooper had specific ideas about how to use Five Point to create a unique bike that would enhance the cyclocross experience for women.

“Everyone knows that women generally have different proportions than men,” Cooper said. “So the goal was to address women’s unique needs and provide them with a ’cross bike that would improve their experience whether they’re racing or just riding a mix of road and dirt.”

The TCX W frame is constructed with lightweight, ride-tuned ALUXX SL aluminum tubing. The key to optimizing the bike for women riders was perfecting the frame geometry and dimensions.

“Before this bike there were really no great options for women cyclocross riders,” Emmett said. “One big problem with riding men’s cyclocross bikes is that the top tubes are often too long. I thought a bike with a shorter top tube would handle much better for women, especially on steep drop-offs and other tricky terrain that’s such a big part of cyclocross racing. The TCX W is a little more upright and the top tube also isn’t quite as high as it is on most men’s bikes.”

Emmett rode early prototype versions of the TCX W to a handful of podium finishes at major U.S. cyclocross races last fall, including UCI events in Portland, Oregon, and Boulder, Colorado.

“Giant engineers created a bike that fits women better and will give them more confidence, but it’s also a very performance-oriented bike for racing,” Emmett said. “It has the larger triangle and rounded top tube for easy shouldering and one thing I recommended was a slightly higher bottom bracket, which helps for pedaling through corners—which is really important in cyclocross.”

The TCX W also features Giant Connect SL women’s handlebars, a women’s saddle and components including the SRAM Rival group that tested well in the adverse conditions ’cross racers must face.

Giant Announces Exciting Additions To Team Lead by de Knegt and Aernouts

The cyclocross division of the Rabobank-Giant Off-Road Team is managed by former Cyclocross World Champion Richard Groenendaal. Four Junior and Under-23 riders from The Netherlands will join de Knegt, silver medalist behind Boom at the 2010 Dutch Cyclocross Championships, and Aernouts on the team.

The developing Rabobank ’cross riders will look to follow in the footsteps of Boom. He came into the sport through cyclocross, won 10 Dutch Cyclocross Championships and a World Championship with Rabobank, and is now racing the Tour de France with the Rabobank Road Team.

In addition to de Knegt, Aernouts and the four young European-based racers, some of Giant’s World Cup mountain bike racers will switch to cyclocross competition in the fall. For example, Adam Craig, a U.S. Olympian in mountain biking, competes in select North American ’cross races and played a role in the development of the new TCX Advanced SL.