SARANA and Rob Britton

If you look at the sponsored teams and athletes that Factor has on its books, you’ll see that Rob Britton has been one of our athletes the longest. Having retired from the road at the end of 2021, he moved into gravel and off-road racing in 2022, though that year he was only racing on Factor mountain bikes. It quickly became clear to both sides that this was a relationship that we wanted to deepen. Here we are, four years on and getting stronger together.

“Before 2022, I was 100% a road racer; I had never done anything else,” Rob admitted. “I had ridden my gravel bike a lot, and it had become a bit of a passion. So when I stopped road racing, this transition to gravel was well thought out. It’s what I had planned to do for a while,” Rob explained. “I needed a mountain bike, though, so I got in touch with Rob Gitelis to ride the LANDO. My first year racing off-road went pretty well, so we decided to deepen the relationship and haven’t looked back since.”

Transitioning from gravel to ultra gravel

Rob had always been a strong road racer, which is inevitably a very structured environment. Now he had the freedom to move off-road, he started experimenting to find the goals that best suited his strengths. Turns out, he’s really, really good at ultras. “I was kinda throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. For instance, I went on a 10-day bikepacking trip through some of the most rugged terrain in Canada, into the heart of grizzly and mountain lion country,” he explained.

Testing the waters in the backcountry of his homeland led him to start targeting some of the most prestigious ultra events around the world, winning several of them, like Badlands and Seven Serpents, until he took a stunning victory at Unbound XL in 2025. In addition to those standout results, he was setting personal goals like establishing the Fastest Known Time from the top of Vancouver Island to the bottom. And then in October 2025, he planned to ride from his home in Victoria to Regina, Canada, where his parents live. Factor’s engineering team wanted to have the bike for him that would assist him on his Big Ride Home.

SARANA Genesis

“Gravel has progressed quite a bit since the OSTRO Gravel was first released. It’s a pretty fine bike still, but tyre clearance was always a bit of an Achilles heel,” Rob explained. “It was really after I won Seven Serpents in 2024 that Graham said he wanted to build a bike for the types of big rides I was doing. Now, I’ve had a lot of people tell me they’d do things for me over the years, but Graham really took it and ran with it. He created this bike, and I think by Christmas last year, they already had the prototype pretty much designed and ready.”

Factor has always been a racing brand. We are committed to developing and building the best racing bikes in the world, which is one reason why the engineers and designers had never really considered making a purely “bikepacking” bike. They couldn’t see where they could apply the Factor ethos. “I’ve never done any bikepacking but I have buddies who do, and I kind of always marvelled at the misery of that whole activity,” Graham Shrive, Factor Chief Engineer revealed. “I would see my buddies head out on a 700 km ride, all clean clothes and high fives on day one, and then when they’d arrive back home after riding straight through, they’d just be these carcasses of human beings. And I started to think, okay there really may be something here that we could optimise a Factor for this use scenario.”

Since Rob Britton had already started specialising in these types of ultra rides, he would naturally be the best source of information for when a competitive ultra rider really wants from a fast, capable bike. “I have a really good relationship with the full design team. Graham (Shrive), Mike (McGinn, Factor Industrial Designer), Jay (Gundzik, Factor Global Creative Director). I talk to Graham frequently. And when he or Mike have a specific design question, they can just ask me. We’ll just talk bike stuff a lot and if there is something that I notice, I’ll bring it up,” Rob said.

“For me this was a really cool project, being this involved in the development. I have learned from racing my bike how to understand what makes a good bike or bad bike, how to make those changes and also how to clarify the issues so the engineers can understand the situation. Graham and I can talk about bikes and I think I can articulate what the pros and cons are with the bike in a way they can understand and retool to address those issues.”

Though the SARANA’s first goal point is to be efficient over long distances, the goal has always been to create a bike that feels composed and in control. Since Rob was in at the beginning of the design process, it was only natural that he would pre-test prototypes to validate all design decisions. That testing ground would end up being in his own backyard, all 2000 kilometres of it.

The Big Ride Home

Rob’s end-of-the-season goal for 2025 was to do what he called his Big Ride Home. He planned to ride from his house in Victoria, Vancouver, to his parents’ house in Regina, Saskatchewan. Over 2000 km and more than 22,000 meters of climbing in nine days, this is a type of mission that represents the SARANA’s prime use case scenario.

“From my doorstep in Victoria to my parents’ place just outside Regina, with mountains, foothills, prairies, heat waves, rain, headwinds, tailwinds, dirt, and endless straight roads, it’s hard to put into words what that experience was like. It’s one of the biggest and most meaningful rides I’ve ever done,” Rob explained.

“Graham wanted me to have the SARANA in time to use it for the ride, and I literally got it a week before I did the Big Ride Home. That was kinda in the 11th hour since we were struggling to find the parts I needed. But I was able to put that bike through the wringer. The ride out to Saskatchewan offered every possible obstacle.”

Through the Canadian deep backcountry, Rob was committed to being self-sufficient, and he needed a bike that could guarantee he could keep moving forward. “The SARANA performed exceptionally,” Rob confirmed.

“No mechanicals. I didn’t even have a dropped chain. One of the days, I was in the most incredible mud I’ve ever ridden. Luckily, it was on a descent because I was able to keep moving and though the mud was cement-like, the tyres kept turning because there was so much clearance. Even though I was running the maximum tyre width, it still had plenty of clearance.”

Perfect for Unbound XL

When Rob won Unbound XL in 2025, he was riding the OSTRO Gravel, which he had specially modified with a suspension fork. It may have looked a bit wonky, but it got the job done, obviously. Nevertheless, it did prove that in certain situations, there was certainly room to improve on the OSTRO Gravel. “If you have 45 mm tyre clearance at the back, when it gets a little muddy, things stop working so well. That’s what makes the SARANA so fantastic; if it gets muddy back there, it just keeps clearing, so you never get locked up,” Rob said.

Though Rob didn’t race on the SARANA at the 2025 Unbound XL, he’s looking forward to having the chance to use it for 2026, since it is basically the perfect bike for an event of that distance and difficulty. “Aside from the tyre clearance, the biggest advantage the SARANA has over the OG is the compliance in the backend,” Rob said. “If you are riding on harsh terrain over long distances, you can see the backend flex. It’s almost a soft tail. So a race like Unbound, that’s a great race for it. The bike is aero, and being able to run bigger tyres and there is more space within the frame to run bottle cages or on-bike storage, so you can keep more nutrition on the bike, and the round seatpost absorbs more of the bumps so your body isn’t taking the beating, which helps quite a bit.”

That doesn’t mean that there is no place for the OSTRO Gravel in Rob’s race line-up. It just means that he has another option depending on the course. “If I were to pick the absolute best bike for a race, something like Belgian Waffle Ride California is definitely OSTRO Gravel territory, as is SBT GRVL. But then you get something like Oregon Trail, that’s now getting into SARANA territory,” Rob said, speaking from experience.

“When you are doing something very long-distance like Unbound XL, that is perfect for SARANA, of course. Traka 360 works well with either the OSTRO Gravel or the SARANA, but Traka 560 that’s for sure best for the SARANA. The longer distance you go, especially if you are a bit more by yourself or it’s a bit more gnarly, and the trails are more technical, that starts to expose some of the weaknesses of the OG. Whereas the SARANA is just optimised for those extreme situations.”

Capable and snappy

Bikepacking bikes are stereotypically, perhaps even necessarily, heavy and plodding. They sacrifice speed for reliability and durability. That is a trade-off that Factor was never willing to make when developing the SARANA. It’s a long-distance bike, but one that offers speed out of the gate. “The SARANA feels fast right away. It does not feel sluggish at all,” Rob said. “The design, like the springy rear-end, helps to delay fatigue but without giving it a lumbering, sluggish ride. And the cool thing about this bike is that it climbs so well. I was deep into the ride into Saskatchewan and climbing big hills on it with no problem.”

Speed is at the heart of every Factor, from the first concept through the test phase to the moment it is race-ready on the start line. “We are creating a space where Factor bikes are arguably the fastest bikes in the world. If Unbound is the biggest gravel race in the world, then Unbound XL is the most important ultra race in the world, and we won it on the OSTRO Gravel,” Rob said.

“Now we’ve won the Traka 560 with Victor Bosoni on the SARANA. So Factor has arguably the fastest ultra bike in the world. Last year, when I won the Mega Hopper on the same SARANA that I did my Big Ride Home, I finished that 10 hours faster than the previous best time. And at Unbound XL… I’m not doing these things just pottering around in the dark. I’m doing the ultra-distance events to be as fast as possible, testing myself and my equipment. We are at the forefront of that movement, maybe more than in any other discipline.”

Growing collection of bike options

The SARANA is just the latest in a line of newly developed bikes from Factor that have been designed to answer the needs of riders looking to improve their performance. Slotting into the gravel line-up with the OSTRO Gravel and ALUTO, the SARANA is the type of bike that can be exceptionally fast in all sorts of adverse conditions, whether you’ve been on your bike for a few hours or a few days.

“I can’t think of another premium brand that has created as many incredible bikes in such a short period of time, with such a small team of engineers and designers. And it’s really cool for me to have been able to be a part of the development of one of these bikes. That’s pretty special to me.”  — Rob Britton, 2025 Unbound XL champion and Factor Racing

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