The greatest compliment you can pay a suit is that you forget you’re wearing it. The fit is so good, the stitching so subtle and the fabric so well cut that it exists as a background reality; seamless tailoring that never distracts by being too lose or too tight. The Sarto Seta is that in a bike, and the sartorial comparison is totally appropriate.
Sarto, an Italian frame builder, has endeavoured to bring Saville Row to the cycling industry, building bespoke made-to-measure bicycles as exclusive and as sought after as classic British tailoring. The company was founded in 1950 by the Sarto family.
Its origin story says it represents the “the pride and tenacity of a nation so rich in creativity and enthusiasm,” because “the future is a door and the past a key”.
Cycling has become rife with this aspirational marketing speak, peddling promises of a utopia in the French mountains in exchange for riders’ wallets and sanity. Irritatingly, in the case of the Seta, you’re totally at ease with all the chatter of love, legacy and perfection after a few minutes on it.
As far as bikes go, it is pretty close to perfection. Manufactured in the company’s Italian home, the Seta is Sarto’s flagship road frame and is designed with mountains in mind. It weighs just 750g – and the complete bike I rode for 10 days in the Cent Cols Challenge tipped the scales at less than 7kg. That is about as light as a bike can get before it moves into the “super” category and starts to come with Formula One team tags and a five-figure asking price.
There is a perennial obsession with light bikes, inspired in part by the UCI’s inane and archaic rule that professional cyclists must compete on a bike weighing more than 6.8kg. Thankfully, manufacturers continue to push the boundaries, building bikes that carry the troubling label “not UCI legal”. The Seta achieves that by using M55J high modulus carbon fibre (Sarto claims it is the stiffest and strongest on the market, and can therefore be rolled thinner without losing performance or durability).
The “illegals” are often forced to sacrifice something for their svelte frame, usually in power transfer or handling, but not so in the Seta. The bike is stiff in the sprint and not twitchy in the corners. In the 400-plus hours I have spent on various bikes this season, I was never more confident than when descending on the Seta. It drops like a stone and carries speed on the flat, but it is when you point it uphill that the fun really starts.
It is light but also aggressive and the made-to-measure frame comes into its own on those two-hour drags uphill, when you’re battling between dancing on the pedals and grinding up in the seat. The Seta is a joy to ride uphill, it is noticeably faster and more comfortable when fighting gravity than any bike I’ve ever ridden.
The Guardian’s test build was finished with Campagnolo wheels, the Alfa Romeo of groupsets – beautiful, enchanting and notorious. Somewhere along the line Campagnolo has developed a reputation for being less reliable and less precise than its Japanese competitor Shimano. It is, many claim, why much of the pro peleton opt for east or south-east Asian assembly lines over Italian craftsmanship. I doubt it. It seems more plausible that fitting dozens of bikes several times over every season with the latest top-end groupsets is expensive, and Shimano is cheaper. It is also not a coincidence that the people who often trash-talk Campag are riding Shimano or Sram as they do it.
In the 2,000km I rode the Seta, I had no problem with the Record groupset or the Bora Ultra Carbon clinchers. Indeed, like the frame, the moving parts worked so smoothly it was hard to find a fault worth writing about. I rode the wheels – carbon clinchers (a phrase that set of warning bells in any seasoned cyclist) – down long, double-digit gradients, slamming the brakes often. I was warned that I would delaminate the wheels, blow a tube and generally come to a sudden and violent end. I did not. The wheels were supremely fast-rolling, quick-stopping and solid.
There is something sterile about most high-end bikes. They are like off-the-rack suits, they will do the job as well as anyone can expect. But they are also clinical, and hard to fall in love with – a tool to be mastered rather than a companion maintained. The Seta is certainly the latter, and is the best thing you’ll ever buy.
