What is Racing?

I was going to write, why do we race? But I wrote it down, and it felt too philosophical a place to start. I’ll get there, but first I figured I need to think about and define what racing actually is.

The reason I’m asking, and going to attempt to answer it, is because we’re preparing to launch our latest bike. Yes, that’s coming very soon, and the more I work on the launch, the more I recognise that this bike is a pinnacle expression of how we do things at Factor.

We refer to all our sponsored teams and athletes collectively as Factor Racing, and I want to explain properly what that means, in my own words, because Factor Racing is more than a marketing exercise. It’s the beating heart of our decision-making.

When I joined Factor, one of my first jobs was to review and consolidate all our sponsorships. It was happening at the same time as I was getting to know everybody at the company, because although Rob Gitelis and I went way back, I didn’t know many of the people inside Factor. Those first few weeks involved trying to figure out who everybody was, where they were, and what they actually did. It wasn’t simple because we’re scattered around the world and operate at a truly global level, yet something became clear to me very quickly: the engineering and manufacturing side of the company led everything.

The bikes came first.

I imagine that sounds obvious, and perhaps it should be, but companies and brands can easily lose track of what they are good at and why they exist. I realised very quickly that wasn’t the case at Factor. The passion Rob and Graham Shrive, our Chief Engineer, share for making bikes is pure and rare. There isn’t some grand long-term product map dictating what has to come next, or a market analysis telling them which box needs filling. Every bike begins as the solution to a problem they have decided is worth trying to solve, and every bike stands on the shoulders of the bikes that came before it.

It’s almost impossible to map too far ahead when you work like that, because you don’t fully know what the next problem is until you have finished solving the current one. Only then do you learn what worked, what didn’t, what could be pushed further and what you want to try next.

And that is where racing comes in.

The feedback doesn’t come from a meeting room or a spreadsheet. It comes from bikes being ridden hard, raced, crashed, pushed beyond what most people will ever ask of them, by riders whose job is to find the limits whether they mean to or not. Racing gives engineering somewhere to test its thinking in the real world, and engineering gives racing better tools with which to go back and test it again.

That loop is Factor Racing. That also explains why Factor Racing is deliberately broad. At any one time we have road teams, gravel racers, triathletes, national federations and development riders racing our bikes in very different environments. It would be much simpler to invest everything into one WorldTour team, maximise the exposure and call that our racing programme, but that wouldn’t give us what we need.

A gravel racer asks different questions of a bike than a WorldTour rider, just as a triathlete will expose things neither of them might ever encounter. Then you have an Olympic national team, where the pursuit of performance becomes even more forensic, demanding levels of innovation, optimisation and marginal gain that almost no other part of cycling requires. Each discipline pushes the equipment in a different way and gives us different problems to solve. And everything we learn informs every design decision we make: like how the HANZŌ Track informed the ONE on the road, which in turn informs what we have coming next in gravel. It makes Factor Racing more complicated to manage, but that complication is the point: we don’t sponsor racing simply to be seen there; we need to learn from it.

It has been one of the most rewarding parts of my work at Factor, recruiting and managing our Factor Racing programme. I’m involved in every aspect of it alongside my wingman on that side of things, Jost Zevnik, who also runs our in-house Slovenian-based development team. It’s our job to recruit and support the athletes, and with every one of them we make it very clear from the beginning that they are going to be involved in research and development.

This was something I never really got to do when I was a professional racer. Even at the top of my career, winning big races, bike companies rarely asked my opinion and certainly never involved me properly in R&D. This wasn’t specific to me; it was simply how things were, and in many cases still are. At Factor, we do things differently, partly because we believe it matters, but also because we can. Rob made it clear to me soon after I joined that Factor was an engineering-led company. It took me a little while to understand properly what he meant by that, but over the past 18 months I have. I’ll dig deeper into that separately, because after all, this piece is about racing.

So, back to the premise: what is racing?

It’s a state of mind, but at its most absolute, it is start and finish lines, and that is where Factor Racing exists: in high-level competition with empirical results. That is where our bikes are pushed to their limits, and sometimes beyond them. It is where we gather feedback, where weaknesses are exposed and where problems are defined that we can then challenge ourselves to solve.

We understand that the vast majority of people who ride a Factor will rarely push their bike to the same degree as Factor Racing does, but that isn’t the point. We want the bike to give you that option.

Our pinnacle bikes are purist, no-holds-barred racing machines, yet across every bike we make, we maintain the same core Factor philosophy: it still needs to feel like a race bike. We may adapt certain models to suit a broader range of riders and uses, but we retain the geometry, handling, and intent specific to the type of racing that bike was designed around.

Because every bike starts with the same questions: who is the racer, and what is the race?

For most of us, racing happens on our own terms. We choose the start and finish lines, decide where we want to go fast, when we want to push, and when we simply want to have fun. Racing doesn’t require a number on your back; it is available to all of us, at whatever speed we happen to be moving.

That is what we want a Factor to give you: the option to race whenever you feel like it, and occasionally, when the road, the bike and your legs all come together, that fleeting sensation of flying across the ground.

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