“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.”