Factor CEO Rob Gitelis on the Brand's Unique Approach
We caught up with the CEO of Factor Bikes, Rob Gitelis, to find out about the brand's singular pursuit of performance, and why every ride should be an experience.
January 11, 2025
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GEAR DIVE
A Factor One Review, 40 Years in the Making
Regroup's Barry Anderson looks back on all of the great bikes he's loved and lost, as he takes the Factor ONE out for a test ride and review. Is it his next great love?
My first bike was a yellow-and-blue Huffy BMX. It had yellow 5-spoke wheels and blue pads on the handlebars and top tube. It was glorious. To this day, it is probably the bike I have spent the most time on of any I have ever owned. I rode it every day, sometimes all day, for years and years. My friends and I would meet up after a bowl of cereal in the morning, grab a shovel, and head out into the desert to dig holes, build jumps, and make noise until the sun started to set and we had to get home. That bike was the definition of freedom and danger and adventure, and every bike I have ever ridden since has had a very tough act to follow.
And there have been many bikes over the years. My first real road bike was a gift from a family friend. It was a Peugeot with downtube shifters, toe cages, and very, very skinny tyres. I thought it was the coolest thing ever. The only problem was that the family friend was 6’4″ and I was probably no more than 5’8″ at the time. I could barely reach the bottom of the pedal stroke, but I made it work for two years.
The first road bike that fit me was a Tommasini, which I bought in my first year of college. It was a lovely blue bike with chrome lugs that I rode until a bright red Schwinn 564 caught my eye. The Schwinn had Mavic Mektronic components (that shifted just fine as long as the road was smooth and dry), and I put a bright pink pair of Eddie Merckx aero bars on it. I fancied myself quite the triathlete back then.
There was the Schwinn Paramount (a stunningly well-mannered bike), the used Merlin Extralight, and the Bianchi Campione. I loved them all and paid for them by working two jobs and driving a car that was only 10 years younger than I was. I then moved to Hawaii, and the roads were terrible, so I started trail running and mountain biking, and lost myself down that rabbit hole for the better part of a decade.
When I emerged, gritty and dirty, with significantly less healthy knees, Lance Armstrong was winning races, and carbon frames didn’t seem quite as scary as they once did. I bought a Look 565 and then traded that for a custom Serotta Ottrott ST. That’s the bike I think I miss the most. Ben and his crew made sublime bikes, and I miss everything about them.
After that was an Orbea Orca (agile), a Parlee ESX (sexy), a Cervelo S5 (wicked fast), a Cervelo R5 (the lightest bike I’ve ever ridden), another Cervelo S5 (did I mention wicked fast?), and then a Colnago V4Rs. The Colnago reminded me of all of those bikes I rode in the 90s. Balanced. Well made. Quiet. In short, it felt like a bicycle. It felt like a bicycle feels when I dream about bicycles, which is often. I rode that bike a ton, and I loved it every single time. Riding the V4 made me feel nostalgic in all the right ways.
And now? Well, the Colnago is gone, and it has been replaced by what might be the closest thing I’ve ever ridden to that old blue and yellow Huffy. The all-new Factor ONE.
"The seat tube angle. The bottom bracket height. That impossible front end. I pictured something twitchy and hand-heavy, and very unpredictable. What I found was quite the opposite.“
BARRY ANDERSON
Don’t get me wrong. Comparing a 1980s Huffy BMX bike to the Factor ONE isn’t exactly comparing apples to apples. It isn’t even comparing apples to oranges. It is more like comparing apples to an F35 fighter jet, but what do both bikes have in common? They are both impossibly fun to ride.
I’m not going to get into the math behind this bike. You can find the math on your own with a quick search (the math is quite impressive, by the way, but not why I am writing this). Unless you make your living as a professional racer, you shouldn’t be using a calculator or a wind tunnel to decide which bike to buy. You should use your heart instead. What does riding a bike like this feel like? What does it make you feel, think, and dream about? Does your bike make you wake up excited to ride the way my old Huffy did? The way the Factor ONE does now? There is a special type of romance about cycling that is deeply embedded in me. It’s in my bones and lives rent-free in my chest. If a bike doesn’t kindle that romance inside, it’s the wrong bike.
The ONE is an absolute ripper and is surprisingly well-mannered. I was genuinely a little worried when I did the math (OK, OK, there is some math involved…) on what my fit would look like on it. The seat tube angle. The bottom bracket height. That impossible front end. I pictured something twitchy and hand-heavy, and very unpredictable. What I found was quite the opposite.
The Factor ONE does all of the obvious things you would expect. It holds speed better than anything I have ever ridden. Things feel easier over 50k/hour. The bike almost lifts underneath you. It practically begs you to push down harder.
The unobvious things were what surprised me the most.
Stiffness: Holy crap. The Factor ONE is far and away the stiffest bike I have ever ridden. I’m far from the most powerful rider in the world, but I’m not the least powerful either. I can hold 1300 watts for 10 seconds in an uphill sprint, and I gave the Factor ONE every bit of that during my first ride, and… nothing—no brake rub. No noise. No creaks. No problems at all. You’d think a bike this stiff would feel like a jackhammer, but it’s not the case with modern wheels and tires. We outfitted the Black Inc. 62 wheels with Pirelli P-Zero Race rubber (28s because that is what the wheels are optimized for. I’m thinking about giving up a couple watts and putting on 30s when I wear these out), aired them up to 60 PSI, and the bike rode like butter. Super, super smooth.
Cornering: This is the thing I was most concerned about (especially coming off of a bike like the Colnago V4Rs). If you’ve ever cornered a TT bike at very high speed, you’ll understand what I was worried the ONE would feel like. Fortunately, my worries were completely unfounded. The engineers at Factor have come up with a very special sauce that makes the ONE corner, like, well, like a bicycle should. I pushed the bike hard in corners, doing my best Tom Pidcock impression, and the turning radius and progression were exactly what I would expect on any other modern race bike. I pushed the tires into the tarmac as hard as I could, and the bike stayed planted and precise underneath me. Riding without hands was natural from the first pedal stroke, and I’ve yet to find a situation where the ONE was at all skittish or unpredictable.
Fit: I’ve always ridden further forward on a bike than what is considered traditionally ‘ideal’. That made the transition from the Colnago to the Factor a little smoother, but honestly, the more I ride the ONE, the more the geometry makes sense. High-performance bike fitting has been moving riders further and further forward on the bike for years, but while the positions have been changing, the bikes’ geometries have stayed pretty much static underneath them. Saddles have been redesigned to allow riders to sit further forward, but the frames themselves haven’t changed. All of which can make the bike handle unpredictably in corners and even contribute to speed wobbles.
What the Factor engineers have done is move the tubes underneath the rider to where they should be when you ride that far forward. The pros are going to ride up there no matter what, so it makes sense that their race bikes should be optimized for that. I can almost guarantee you that the next generation of aero bikes from the big companies will trend in this direction. If they don’t, they’ll be left behind. The only thing confusing at all about calculating your position on a Factor ONE is the way the bars are labelled. If you use a traditional Bar XY calculator and plug in your fit with the ONE’s stack and reach, it will give you a stem length that is 2cm shorter than what you actually need to buy, but… not really. My Colnago fit, plotted on a Factor ONE, says that I need a 120 stem. The factory packaging for the bar/stem is labelled 120, but it is relabelled and sold by Factor as 140. Why? Because when you bolt that bar/stem onto the Factor ONE, and its incredibly sexy bayonet fork, it functions like a 140.
In short, if you have questions about how to plot your position onto a Factor ONE, talk to a good bike fitter. Like me!
Climbing: Dear weight weenies, You are not going to like this. I get it. I get it. I understand the desire for a lightweight bike. A light bike feels quick and agile and will impress your friends when they pick it up. They accelerate quicker than a heavier bike, but after that They are slow. They just are. And I ride bikes to go fast.
I haven’t weighed the Factor ONE yet, but I’d guess it’s around 17-18 pounds with pedals and cages. That 14-pound Aethos you have? You can definitely feel the difference when you pick it up. You can feel the difference when you spin the bike up from a stop or accelerate from a slow speed. But after that? The weight doesn’t matter. Those four pounds don’t matter.
There are only three instances when having a super lightweight bike is an advantage:
- When you accelerate the bike. It absolutely takes more energy to get an 18-pound bike up to speed than it does a 14-pound bike.
- When climbing at a very slow speed. And when I say slow, I mean really slow. We are talking 8-9mph or less. As soon as you get over 9mph, aerodynamics become more important. Why do you think Jonus and Pog rode the S5 and Y1 on all of the mountain stages at the Tour last year?
- When having a superlight bike makes you happy. Most of us are not getting paid to ride our bikes—quite the opposite. We pay to play. And if you are happier playing on a 14-pound bike than you are on an 18-pound bike? Then that makes me happy too. (Just don’t complain about how hard it is to keep up when the pace is over 35mph!)
Me personally? I hate climbing. I only go uphill so I can go downhill. There aren’t very many hills here in the Valley that I can’t get up at more than 10mph, so I’m going to pick the aero bike seven days a week, and twice on Sunday.
The Factor ONE climbs great. The stiffness, the position over the pedals, all of it works together to make a bike that goes up hills just fine. It is alarmingly fast on short punchy hills, makes false flats significantly easier, and won’t slow you down on anything but the steepest and longest climbs.
So there you have it. The minds at Factor have put together an amazing bike that continues to make me smile every single time I ride it. I have no complaints, not one. Well, maybe one. We built it with SRAM Red, and I chose their 52-tooth chainring. The Factor ONE is so fun over 50kph, I’m thinking about switching to the 54!
FEATURED
FACTOR ONE ROAD BIKE
Go beyond speed, peers, measure and possibly reason with the formidable Factor ONE, an unapologetically aero road bike for the rider seeking pure, unadulterated pace.
