Review Highlight: Norco Search

All road, adventure road, gravel grinding. Whatever you want to call it, there’s probably never been a better, or more confusing time to be a bicycle consumer. Every bike is refined and designed for a specific riding task, one of a plethora of options that the internet has enabled to become common vernacular. We’ve got aero road bikes, climber’s bikes, classics bikes, training bikes, adventure bikes, cyclocross bikes, endurance bikes. There are more. Norco is best known for their hard-hitting Canadian designed mountain bikes, although they hold an equivalent household familiarity to Malvern Star in Canada. It’s hardly surprising that we don’t see their road bikes in Australia, but an adventurous drop bar bike fits the brand profile just nicely.

Smaller builders have been simmering away on the fringes for years with bikes designed for riding roads that won’t suit your twitchy handling, 21mm tired ‘road’ bike. Fatter tires are the primary order of the day, complimented by geometry that favours stability and comfort for covering big adventurous days on dirt and gravel roads, as well as the regular sealed variety.

All the geometry tweaks dull the edge of the Search on tar, but on dirt it feels appropriately fast and enthused that you want to cover ground rather than sniff daisies.