Vitus Launched New Venon Evo all-road bike with gravel capability

The new Vitus Venon Evo is an all-road bike that can be set up for fast gravel riding, with clearance for 45mm tyres, but also available in road endurance specs with 28mm tyres. Vitus reckons that the Venon Evo will appeal to riders who want to be able to mix road and off-road rides and who might invest in a second wheelset, so that they can quickly choose whether it’s a gravel or a tarmac riding day.

There’s a wide range of groupset options including Shimano Di2 and SRAM AXS for road specs and SRAM single-ring groupsets for gravel configurations. Current road specs include 25mm alloy Prime wheels, but Vitus will introduce options with aero carbon wheels in late 2023.

All-road frameset

The Vitus Venon Evo is the latest addition to Vitus’s drop bar bike range, plugging the gap between its Substance gravel bike and its performance-oriented ZX1 Evo aero bike and Vitesse Evo lightweight road bike.

The original Vitus Venon was an endurance bike, but Vitus wanted to make the new Venon Evo more versatile and suitable for fast gravel riding as well as longer road rides. To that end, it has clearance for 45mm tyres and a geometry that’s midway between the Substance and the Vitesse Evo.

The most tricky part of adding space for wide tyres is usually the area behind the bottom bracket, where there are constraints imposed by the bottom bracket shell width and the chainline. To get around these, gravel bikes often have a dropped chainstay on the right side.

This gives the bikes a slightly lopsided, distinctive gravel bike look, which Vitus wanted to avoid. While many aero road bikes have their bottom bracket shell built up above the axle, the Venon Evo’s extends below the axle. This allows Vitus to anchor the chainstays lower down, which has the same effect as the dropped chainstay on a gravel bike, allowing extra tyre clearance while maintaining the symmetric straight chainstays and short 420mm chainstay length of a road bike and keeping a shortish wheelbase.

There’s also plenty of front tyre clearance at the fork crown. To compensate for its height, Vitus has kept the head tube comparatively short for an endurance or gravel-oriented machine, while still providing a higher stack than on its road race bikes.

The front end of the Venon Evo is an evolution of the ZX1 aero bike, and Vitus says its CFD modelling shows it to be even more aero. There’s internal brake hose routing using an FSA NS SMR stem, with the brake hoses enclosed within a plastic sleeve under the stem and then routed invisibly into an FSA ICR headset.

Higher spec road-going bikes are equipped with Prime Primavera aero carbon handlebars, while gravel specs get either alloy or carbon Prime gravel bars.

At the rear, the Venon Evo has a conventional round carbon seatpost, with a round seat tube which has a small cut-out for the rear wheel. Like Vitus’s other Evo bikes, the Venon Evo has a one-piece main frame, which Vitus says helps reduce the frame’s weight.

Although there are mudguard mounts, the Venon Evo frameset doesn’t have the usual gravel bike array of bottle cage and bag mounts. Its two bottle cage mounts reinforce the ‘fast gravel’ rather than bikepacking objective.

Road and gravel specs

Vitus has up on the Venon Evo’s all-road design by offering the frameset in road-going RS and gravel GR specs.

The four RS road specs are equipped with double chainsets, with both Shimano Di2 and SRAM AXS options available. All run Prime Attaquer Disc 25mm deep alloy wheels, although Vitus plans to offer Aero specs with deeper section carbon wheels towards the end of 2023. Tyres for road specs are Michelin Power Cup 28mm, which actually measure around 30mm wide on the 21mm internal width rims.

At launch, all three GR gravel specs have SRAM single ring groupsets, either AXS XPLR 12-speed or Rival 11-speed mechanical. They’re equipped with Michelin Power Gravel 40mm tyres, with options with Prime Attaquer alloy wheels or Prime Primavera 44mm deep carbon wheels. All the gravel specs are also fitted with Prime Orra handlebars, either alloy or carbon.

Claimed weights fall between 7.7kg for the Venon Evo-RS Ultegra Di2 and Force AXS road specs and 8.5kg for the gravel spec Venon Evo-GR Rival 11-speed.