Factor ELARA Gravel Bike
Speed Over Everything — Factor’s pure-speed gravel race platform, built to hold pace when the surface stops cooperating.
Factor ELARA Gravel Bike
Meet the ELARA: the bike that retires the OSTRO Gravel. Factor’s pure-speed gravel race platform, rebuilt from the ground up around a single idea — that a large-volume tire is a speed tool, not a comfort feature. Clearance for 57 mm of rubber, road-race geometry with longer reach and a lower bottom bracket, a split-plane rear triangle that holds the chainstays to 423 mm, and aerodynamics inherited from the ONE and the OSTRO VAM. Developed with Gravel Earth Series champion Magnus Bak Klaris, raced in prototype under Romain Bardet before it had a name. Built to hold speed when the ground stops cooperating.
BUILDS FROM $10,099.00
More about the ELARA
The ELARA is not an update to the OSTRO Gravel. It replaces it. New front triangle, new rear triangle, new fork, new carbon lay-up, and a brief narrower and sharper than anything Factor have previously pointed at a gravel start line. Their industrial designer Mike McGinn put it plainly enough during development: this isn’t just an OSTRO Gravel with bigger tires, it’s a serious redesign. The reasoning is a reading of where the sport went. Courses got faster, equipment specialised, and the front of a gravel field started to look like a road race that had wandered off the tarmac. The OSTRO Gravel balanced speed against versatility. Factor decided that balance was the wrong instinct for the sharp end, and built something that doesn’t attempt it.
The idea at the centre of the bike came from a rider rather than an engineer. Factor’s team initially considered 57 mm tires excessive on a high-speed race bike — until Magnus Bak Klaris, who won the men’s Gravel Earth Series overall in 2025, made the case that at the speeds the front of a race actually holds, a large-volume tire stops being a comfort feature and becomes a speed feature: more traction, better impact management, lower rolling losses over broken ground, far fewer punctures, and a much greater tolerance for choosing the wrong line when fatigue arrives. The engineers went back to the drawing board in October 2025. By February 2026 a prototype was racing, and both Bak Klaris and Romain Bardet reported it was faster. That is the unnamed bike the trade press photographed at Unbound.
Delivering it took a rear triangle unlike anything else in the category. Clearance for a 57 mm tire, room for a 52-tooth chainring, and the option of a 2x drivetrain, all on a short rear-centre, meant a split-plane design with a lowered drive-side stay and an offset seat-tube junction — sculpted to thread between the tire on one side and the chainring and mech on the other. Chainstays hold at 423 mm on a size 56, ranging 420 to 425 across the six sizes, and the frame came out lighter than the OSTRO Gravel’s while measuring stiffer at the bottom bracket and head tube. The geometry goes road-aggressive to match: longer reach, reduced trail, and a lower bottom bracket that puts the rider’s weight back down inside the bike rather than perched on top of a tall axle. The front end draws directly from the ONE and the OSTRO VAM — planar fork integration, a narrow hourglass head tube, and reworked transitions around the down tube and bottle zone, validated in CFD and confirmed in the tunnel.
One thing worth understanding before you choose a build. You get the full 57 mm of clearance with a 1x drivetrain. Fit a 2x and the rear clearance drops to 47 mm. Both are good bikes and Factor deserve credit for keeping 2x on the table at all at this rear-centre, but they are meaningfully different bikes, and which one is right depends on the courses you’re actually racing. It’s the first conversation we’d want to have with you, and it’s the sort of thing that’s much easier to get right before an order than after.
Factor’s premium partner in Arizona and beyond, we’ve been with the brand since the days most US riders couldn’t pronounce “Gitelis,” and we’ve built every model in the range across the years. The ELARA rewards thoughtful choices more than most: the drivetrain and the tire platform that follows from it, the casing and pressure for the surfaces you’ll actually be on, and the fit — because this bike ships with a one-piece cockpit across six sizes and a choice of seatpost offset, and a one-piece cockpit does not let you change your mind cheaply. Settle the position first and let the parts follow it. That’s what Regroup FIT is for, and it’s where a bike that’s technically yours becomes a bike that’s actually yours.
We wrote about the ELARA and what it replaces when it launched, and our Factor gravel bikes buyer’s guide puts it side by side with the Aluto and the Sarana. For the thinking behind the shapes, The Shape of Speed has Factor designers Mike McGinn and Stuart Munro — both quoted above — on how they build a race bike, and our conversation with Factor CEO Rob Gitelis covers why the brand works the way it does.
1x or 2x? On the ELARA It Is Really a Tire Question
Factor made a point of keeping 2x on the table when almost every 57 mm gravel bike arrives 1x-only. That is a genuine achievement on a 423 mm rear-centre — but it comes with a condition worth stating plainly, because the marketing tends not to.
- 1x gives you the full 57 mm — the whole point of the bike, with a 52-tooth chainring approved. This is how every complete ELARA build ships.
- 2x drops rear clearance to 47 mm — the front derailleur and inner ring need the room the tire was using. Still a lot of tire, and still a very fast bike, but not the headline number.
- So choose the drivetrain first — everything downstream follows from it. Rough, technical, traction-limited racing points at 1x and the big tire. Long, rolling, mixed-gradient racing where you want to stay on top of a gear, and where 47 mm is plenty, makes a real case for 2x.
- 2x means a frame-up build — Factor’s complete bikes are all 1x, so a 2x ELARA is a conversation about a frameset and a build sheet rather than a box.
The honest other side: the ELARA is a specialist and the most expensive bike in Factor’s gravel range. If you want one bike that goes long and carries a bag, the Aluto is the better companion. If your events run for days and go properly remote, the Sarana is the right tool. The ELARA is for racing — and if that is what you are doing, come and talk to us before you pick a build, because on this frame that single decision changes the bike more than any other.
THE FINER DETAILS
423 mm of Chainstay, and Everything Still Clears
Fitting a 57 mm tire is easy. Fitting one alongside a 52-tooth chainring, with room left for a front derailleur, on a rear-centre short enough to still feel like a race bike, is not — and the industry’s usual answer is to lengthen the chainstays until the problem disappears. Factor took the other route: a split-plane rear triangle with a lowered drive-side stay and an offset seat-tube junction, shaved until it fit. The result holds 423 mm on a size 56 and comes in lighter than the OSTRO Gravel’s rear end while measuring stiffer where the power goes in. As design engineer Stuart Munro put it: “We just kept shaving it until it fit, 423 mm, and everything still clears.”
A Big Tire Is a Speed Tool, Not a Comfort Feature
The ELARA clears up to 57 mm on approved 700c rim widths, and the reason has nothing to do with a softer ride. At race pace on broken ground, a large-volume tire holds traction longer, manages impacts better, rolls faster across rough surfaces, punctures less, and forgives the line you didn’t quite mean to take. Every one of those is a moment you don’t have to sit up and scrub speed. Magnus Bak Klaris, the Gravel Earth Series champion who talked Factor into the clearance in the first place, put it best: “It’s not about comfort; it means I don’t have to slow down, I can hold speed without thinking.” Note the trade-off worth knowing: 57 mm comes with a 1x drivetrain. Run 2x and the rear clearance is 47 mm.
Black Inc SIXTY FOUR: Depth, Because the Tire Got Wider
Sixty-four millimetres of rim depth sounds like a lot for gravel until you follow the reasoning. As a race tire gets fatter, the wheel has to work harder to manage airflow around the whole tire-and-rim system — so the section goes deeper to recover the efficiency the volume costs. A 30 mm internal width supports a 57 mm casing properly instead of letting it squirm under load, ceramic bearings and a 30-tooth freehub keep the drive sharp out of loose corners, and the set comes in at 1,620 g. Developed with Magnus Bak Klaris alongside the frame, it isn’t an accessory bolted to a bike — it’s half of the system the bike was designed around. Available with the ELARA, or separately.
About the brand
Factor Bikes
Performance, always performance. It's an overused word in the bike industry, if not everywhere, but Factor differentiates itself from the rest of the pack with its single-minded focus on speed. The engineering team at Factor combines decades of experience developing at the cutting edge of the sport. Factor's motto of 'Never Status Quo' is no off-the-cuff idea. It's the founding principle behind everything the brand creates.
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