Let the Gravel Games Begin

The 2026 gravel season has officially begun: Factor Racing is present and correct. From the Atlas Mountain to the Girona hills our riders are ready and going for the win, starting with Victor Bosoni and Cynthia Carson.

They did it.

Victor Bosoni and Cynthia Carson have won the men’s and women’s overall at the Atlas Mountain Race, and the rides they delivered were extraordinary. Over 1,420 km and nearly 30,000 m of climbing, they endured rain and ice, wind, detours, and the kind of sleep deprivation that turns days into a blur. Victor finished in four days. Cynthia in five.

The terrain was so wild they opted for mountain bikes. Victor chose the full-suspension LANDO XC. Cynthia went with the hardtail LANDO HT. Fully self-supported, they relied only on what they carried and whatever they could find along the way, shops, roadside cafés, the occasional restaurant, and there can’t have been many of those deep in Morocco’s Atlas Mountains.

There was no live coverage, no highlight reels, no running commentary. To follow the race meant refreshing a tracker and watching a dot inch across the map. In the ultra world they call it dotwatching, and for everyone at Factor it became a near full-time occupation. In a world overloaded with information, being reduced to something so simple felt unexpectedly thrilling, like the early Tour de France must have been, waiting for a newspaper report or a scrap of radio news to learn who was still in the race.

Congratulations, Victor and Cynthia. Magnificent.

Opening Weekend

Now we turn to a different kind of gravel racing: the fast kind.

This weekend marks the opening round of the Gravel Earth Series at Santa Vall in Girona. We  have ten riders on the start line, including last year’s winner, Danish National Gravel Champion, and 2025 Gravel Earth Series overall winner Magnus Bak. He starts as the favourite, but some of his toughest competition may come from within our own camp, with Romain Bardet and Petr Vakoc lining up alongside him.

In the women’s race, we’re bringing serious firepower too: Nicole Frain, the 2025 UCI Gravel World Series overall winner, and her runner-up Wendy Oosterwoud. And they’ll need all the firepower they can bring, because Santa Vall is being talked about as one of the most stacked gravel fields of the year. A proper who’s-who of the scene, and everyone turns up in Girona believing they can make a statement.

Putting out the welcome mat

With so many of our crew already in town, we made the most of it.

On Thursday morning we welcomed the whole group to Factor EU HQ. Our Chief Engineer, Graham Shrive, walked them through how we build our bikes and gave them a look behind the curtain at current R&D work, including projects some of our racers are already helping shape. I also shared why Factor Racing matters so much to us: the way they ride is a direct input into how we think, how we design, and how we improve. That’s why we wanted them inside the process. As a racer, I never experienced this, no sponsor ever showed me how bikes were made, or invited me into the work of making them better. At Factor, that’s exactly what we do.

Hitting the road

Then we went for a ride.

It was “easy” for the group, and occasionally less so for me, which was a timely reminder (as if I needed one) of how fast these riders really are. Still, it was a good day: a chance to talk setups, compare notes, and look closely at what people are choosing when the stopwatch matters.

The bikes were split about 50/50 between OSTRO GRAVEL and ALUTO, with a true smorgasbord of tyre choices. If you’re into tyres, read this: Graham has done a proper deep dive. That’s one of the things we love about gravel: there are fewer definitive answers, and so much comes down to style, feel, risk tolerance, and preferences. We’re still learning, and that’s the point. Racing is where we test, where we refine, and where we get better.

And this weekend, it’s going to be a blast: Girona, Santa Vall, and ten Factor riders ready to light up the season.