Factor O2 VAM Road Bike
A climber’s delight
Factor O2 VAM Road Bike
If you like to ascend at speed, you might consider adding an aero climbing bike to your quiver, like the Factor O2 VAM, a sensationally fast and light KOM-killer that delivers pure all-course performance, comfort and confidence for big road days.
BUILDS FROM $7,499.00
About the Factor O2 VAM
Weighing just 6.4kg out-of-the-box for a 54cm frame with a high-end electronic groupset, the Factor O2 VAM is almost in a class of its own. And when you consider its aero enhancements, it’s a solo ride from here on up. To get the weight down while still keeping the wheels on the ground, the Factor design team scoped out exotic high-grade materials, super-computer-sculpted tube shapes, and devised a new manufacturing process so advanced, they had to build a whole new factory to accommodate it.
For how the O2 VAM sits alongside its stablemates, our Factor road bikes buyer’s guide maps the whole range.
Why an Aero Climbing Bike?
Climbing bikes used to buy their lightness with slow tube shapes, and aero bikes paid for their speed in grams. The O2 VAM is Factor refusing that trade:
- Genuinely light — 6.4kg out of the box for a 54cm frame with a top electronic groupset. That is pro-team territory before a mechanic gets involved.
- Genuinely aero — in the wind tunnel, in the low-yaw conditions that make up most real riding, the O2 VAM sits only a handful of watts behind the OSTRO VAM.
- The sum — on a real climb at a real gradient, that small aero gap disappears under the weight advantage. That is the whole argument for this bike in one sentence.
The honest other side: if your riding is flat, fast and decided in a sprint, the OSTRO VAM is the better tool, and this bike will not change that. But if the rides you plan your season around go uphill, this is the Factor to start with. Our Factor road bikes buyer’s guide puts numbers on all of it.
THE FINER DETAILS
ROCKET SHIP-QUICK
The O2 VAM feels otherworldly when you press the pedals because it’s so fast to respond and so quick to reach high speeds. Part of that is down to its stiffness - the O2 is as stiff as Factor’s Ostro VAM and even shares the same geometry. And that’s the kicker because how Factor did that is where the genius of the O2 meets the road. It’s graceful in the turns, confident rolling in hot, exemplary at high lean angles, and so agile you’ll want to ride back up the mountain just to go down it again.
NEXT-GEN AERO
The sheer speed of the O2 VAM owes a lot to the ground-breaking aero work of Factor’s engineering team, who created the frame’s aggressively truncated airfoil shapes. A focus on some complicated aerodynamic principles helps make the O2 VAM especially fast in ‘low yaw conditions’, times when there’s either no wind, a straight headwind, or a slight crosswind. In other words, conditions you’ll find on almost every ride.
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ALL ENTRIES
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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