INTERVIEW

Bastion: Building The World's First Hyperbike Company

Over in Melbourne, Australia, Bastion is busy turning the world of high-performance bikes on its head. We sat down with co-founder Ben Schultz to find out about the brand's newest model, the Archetype, its design process, and what makes a hyperbike.

Bastion's Ben Schultz, seen here on the right, leading a Bastion Owner's ride.

Australia's Bastion Cycles is based at the ends of the earth, which is fitting, given that it takes the design and engineering of its bikes beyond charted territory, to the edge of the map and beyond. Here be dragons, said the old nautical maps to mark the end of the known world and the unexplored territories of a new one. Bastion might say: Here be Dreams.

Ben Schultz is definitely a dreamer. Today, he looks very zen, which could be an effect of the intelligent lighting in Bastion’s HQ, which waxes and wanes behind him in a most mindful way when it doesn’t detect movement below, an indecision that elicits a gentle air pat from Ben to keep them glowing. He does this without breaking eye contact. Zen again.

 

We’re catching up to talk about Bastion and its new bike, the Archetype. It’s a big topic. We mention to Ben that we last saw him at 2024’s Rouleur, surrounded by smiling cyclists, holding court with a gentle gaze that belied the intensity of a bike show. “That was a good one,” he says. “It’s a long way to travel for us, of course, but meeting people in person is very important. Screens only get you so far.”

 

Was the Archetype in the works back then? “To be completely honest, it’s been in the works for a decade.” He might need to expand on that. “It’s a lot closer to the bike we wanted to make when we started the brand and first started sketching ideas,” he says. “But back then, we didn’t have the technology or capability to build it, particularly on the tubing side. For various reasons, when we started Bastion, we went down the filament winding path: it’s robot-controlled, material efficient and takes a lot of the human error out of the equation. It also looks amazing! At the time we had to outsource the tubing, and the company we used only offered round tubes, so that was the route we took.”

 

Fast forward to 2025 though, and Ben tells us that Bastion makes all of its tubes in-house, except for the radically thin seat stays of the Superleggera, which, he adds by way of explanation, “we just haven’t gotten around to yet.” He credits the change to Bastion’s expanded staff of twenty, who developed the necessary skills and knowledge under one roof, and a new hybrid way of working with composites. “We use pre-preg fabric that we wrap onto a mandril and filament wind over the top of that,” he explains. “The parts then go into a mold where they’re cured at extremely high pressures. Our edge, if you will, is that we can create extremely high-quality, aerodynamically efficient tubing profiles with a filament winding aesthetic, made to any length to suit different geometries. As far as we know, we’re the only ones in the world doing that.”

“We don’t have an entry-level offering,” he continues. “Our starting point is where others finish. We’re pretty obsessive about trying to push the limit of what’s possible, with a level of craftsmanship hitherto unseen on two wheels.” By his own admission, it’s been a long road, transformative for Bastion and the wider custom bike industry. “In 2015, when James, Dean, and I founded the brand, we would not have bought a custom bicycle. Most of the people who make custom bikes are extremely talented craftspeople. But the materials used were primarily titanium and steel, which have their benefits, but also drawbacks like weight and stiffness, and how they were designed was largely down to the builder’s intuition and experience. That appeals to some, but we were engineers with a background in development and putting blind trust in someone’s guess, however educated that might be didn’t appeal to us. We saw an alternative approach, one that uses a combination of titanium and composite materials and would allow us to answer certain questions, about handling, weight and stiffness, going beyond a builder’s taste or point of view, to verifiable metrics that point to superior performance.”

 

Which is how Bastion departs towards higher ground. “We have our own simulation tool, utilizing our own geometry based performance metrics for handling,” says Ben. “We can simulate how stiff the bike is going to be and how agile it will steer and turn. We create a custom engineering report for every client, where we enter data from the bikes they may have ridden and show them a unique geometry of their theoretical Bastion and how the two compare. It’s like a virtual test ride,”

 

A Bastion might be a hyperbike, but, as Ben notes, it’s the look of one that democratizes the brand. “We’re trying to transcend cycling. On the one hand, we are known to the cycling industry, mainly only to cycling aficionados, so there’s more work to do there, but it’s the reaction to a Bastion from non-cyclists that reminds us how very different a Bastion is.” Reactions, he says, that range from shouts of ‘what’s that bike, mate?’ from building sites and passing pedestrians, to conversations at coffee shops and drivers calling out of car windows, all drawn to the extraordinary design of a Bastion.

 

The Archetype, however, Bastion’s newest model, could have upended everything the brand had built so far if Ben and his team failed to strike the right balance. It was to be Bastion’s first ‘aero’ bike, but not in the way of an extreme silhouette that signals speed above all else “Aero bike design has pretty much converged on two shapes,” Ben explains. “The first is the classic time trial shape, and the second, the more generalized aero look that’s now becoming part of every mass-market brand’s offering.” Bastion, being Bastion, didn’t take either route. “We wanted to be able to show that Archetype was the fastest Bastion ever, but it still had to look desirable and incorporate our design aesthetic,” says Ben. But isn’t desire subjective? “That’s the problem!” he laughs. “Ultimately, with whatever decisions we had to make, we had to trust our instincts, that what we thought was beautiful, what was also fast, and was what other cyclists would also appreciate.”

"You won't catch the detail in the frame until you see it up close, the ovalized tubes, the truncations, the asymmetric shapes - it's all quite subtle and designed to stay out of your way."

BEN SCHULTZ

Few areas of the bike indicate its aero intentions more than the seat stays – lower being faster (as the thinking generally goes). But lower them too much and the entire shape and symmetry suffer, and it will look like an aero-specific bike. Or at least, the eye is drawn to one area when it should be taking in the entirety of the form, as it would with a more timeless design. “Compared to our other models, the Archetype has a more pronounced offset between where the seat stays meet the seat tube and where the top tube meets the seat tube,” says Ben. “We played with varying lengths and dimensions, with every decision having a knock-on effect across weight, strength, aesthetics and aerodynamics. The lower you go with the stays, the less frontal area you have, and the more aerodynamic it becomes. We had to balance the position of the stays with our design language, considering what we liked the look of, the aerodynamic benefits, and so forth.” What helped them make the final decision on how low to set the stays was the Bastion community. “We shared some early-stage ideas with ten very good customers of ours, who had some input,” he says. “But ultimately, what helped us make the right decision was circling back to our original intention for the bike. It’s not an all-out aero race bike. It’s a modern, fast road bike for group rides, Gran Fondos and such. That is how our customers use them.”

 

Bastion must have got it right because we didn’t even clock the drop when we first saw the bike. It just hit the senses like a great bike should. “I’m happy you didn’t think it looked like an aero bike,” says Ben. “You won’t catch the detail in the frame until you see it up close, the ovalized tubes, the truncations, the asymmetric shapes – it’s all quite subtle and designed to stay out of your way.” Nevertheless, the speed is there, and thanks to Bastion’s tests in the wind tunnel, the team in Melbourne can be justifiably proud that the Archetype is objectively the brand’s fastest ever bike. Compared to Bastion’s Icon Superleggera, the Archetype reduced drag by 6–8 watts at 35 km/h. And at 50 km/h, the Archetype slashed aerodynamic drag by an impressive 18–25 watts depending on yaw angle.

 

Yet it still looks like a timeless road bike. “The human eye appreciates parallel lines,” notes Ben, “as well as balance and proportional triangles. Da Vinci’s Golden Ratio still holds to this day, so when we see a beautiful bike, we’re seeing something of the ratios that appear in nature.” The team at Bastion, he says, “think about this stuff a lot”, conversations that led to the coining of a new term, ‘Ascendant Complexity’, the idea that “we start with simple things, like titanium powder and from that create increasingly complex things that grow in a balanced and beautiful way, reminiscent of the natural world.” Try quantifying that. “Impossible,” he says with a shrug of the shoulders. “But you know when it’s right.”

Ben leading one of the brand's global owner's rides at the 2024 Tour Down Under
Ben leading one of the brand's global owner's rides at the 2024 Tour Down Under

The Archetype can accept a 34mm tire, and possibly up to a 38mm with more marginal clearance, according to Ben. It’s not a gravel bike, but, like any Bastion, it’s not going to shy away from imperfect roads. “Pop a 35mm on and you can, of course, explore beyond the asphalt, but we prefer to move customers away from the idea that one Bastion can cover every surface. The geometry of each of our bikes is designed for a certain objective. We prefer to let it be known that we can create a customer’s dream road bike, or dream gravel bike, rather than one bike that can do it all. That’s not us. We prefer to build you the most enjoyable bike for a certain pursuit.” There are forks in the trail, though, and just like Bastion’s Crossroad grew out of the brand’s Road platform, Ben believes the same will happen with the Archetype, with a future version taking off in a new direction. Watch this space.

 

Beyond the bikes themselves, a big draw of owning a Bastion is accessing its global community, with regular meet-ups in some of the world’s most ride-worthy destinations. “Oh, they’re great fun,” says Ben. We get the chance to make friends, drink world-class wine and eat amazing food together, and bond over shared stories and experiences.” And ride? “We do a lot of that, too, yes!” Ultimately, the events speak to the reason friends Ben and James started Bastion: to create a legacy that means more than the sum of its parts.

 

But what parts!