This article was first published in Rouleur Issue 142 and was produced in collaboration with Factor
“I sat in our board meeting two years ago and said, 'Everybody needs to be complicit with the fact that I’m gambling this company’s future on how I think people are going to want to sit on their bike’. Everybody said okay, we’re in, let’s do it.”
Graham Shrive is talking about how the brand’s radical ONE aero bike came into being – and it’s not exactly what you expect to hear from the chief engineer of a modern bike brand but, as the outspoken Canadian explains, Factor doesn’t follow – it leads.
“You just can’t pull something like this if you’re one of these big monolithic companies that has a product steering committee that only meets once a month, a global procurement committee where everybody wants to put their thumbprint on it. Factor isn’t like that. It’s about just not being afraid to jump in.”
He continues: “At Factor we’re not afraid to roll the dice. It’s important that we take risks. It informs what we’re doing. The fork for the Bugatti bike is a great example. We went down rabbit holes pretty far.”
Today Shrive is in Factor’s European HQ in Girona, a smallish, recently acquired former electrical equipment manufacturer’s warehouse that is also not what you expect in a city famous for its beautifully preserved medieval old town, picturesque cobbled streets and iconic iron bridge designed by Gustave Eiffel. Factor doesn’t do traditional buildings, either.
The first thing he wants to talk about is a project that takes Factor’s philosophy a step further: the collaboration with Bugatti that goes beyond professional racing under the UCI’s rules and regulations.
“The Bugatti project originally started as an exploration of what would be possible without the usual regulatory constraints,” he says. “When the Factor ONE was first conceived it was designed with a wider fork in mind. This is what the fork was originally supposed to be like before the UCI stepped in.”
The fork has an internal width of 127mm – a dimension that exceeds the 115mm that was decreed by cycling’s governing body right in the middle of the ONE’s development. Not only is it now too wide but it also features F1-inspired ducts to smooth airflow – entirely illegal when things as minor as shaped dustcaps are not allowed.
“When the Bugatti conversation began about a year and a half ago, that gave us permission to do it. Bugatti can make the fastest cars in the world without them fitting into a homologated racing series. The Bugatti Bolide is a track-only, non-road-legal hypercar that delivers incredible performance. Rob [Gitelis Factor’s owner] asked the team, What if we take inspiration from the Bugatti Bolide? What if Factor made a bike with Bugatti that didn’t have to conform to any governing body’s regulations?
The Factor ONE now has a UCI-legal fork and is being raced by Human Powered Health in the women’s World-Tour, but, says Shrive, “We had already invested a huge amount of time in understanding the wider concept and I wanted to continue doing that. So we started thinking about where it could exist in its purest and highest-performance format as it had originally been intended”
The fork, dubbed F.UCI, became the centrepiece of the limited-edition Bugatti bike, which is a no-expense-spared version of the ONE with carbon SRM cranks and new Black Inc Hyper wheels that will be launched with the bike.
Ex-pro David Millar, Factor’s chief brand officer since 2025, and a Girona resident, adds: “This was an opportunity to take a skunkworks project and turn it into something truly exceptional. It’s only a few watts faster than the ONE, but that means it’s the only road bike in the world that’s faster.”
Shrive has flown to Girona to join Millar for the testing phase of Factor’s latest project, a new big-clearance gravel race bike. Along with pro riders Romain Bardet and Magnus Bak, they will test three different layups to find out whether, in Shrive’s words, “stiffness matters on a gravel bike or not”.
He says: “We have an SL that’s quite flexy; what I think will be the production version and then a heavier-weight one that’s extremely stiff. Because this bike has large tyre clearance and a storage door and so on, bottom bracket stiffness was quite a concern for us. It’s a challenge to get that stiffness up – so now we’re over here in Girona with those exact bikes. Tomorrow we’ll ride with them, we’ll put the riders on the same bike twice and gather their input. Does stiffness matter on a gravel bike or not? I don’t really know the answer to that. What if the wet noodle bike is loved by everybody, what do we do then?”
Because Factor owns its factory in Taiwan, that means that as soon as Shrive’s question is answered, more prototypes can be made very quickly and retested. Before he acquired Factor in 2015, Rob Gitelis had worked for Advanced Composites and Profile Design in Taiwan. He owned a carbon manufacturing company in Taichung that was already making frames for established European names. Owning the whole process, including the manufacturing, is really what gives Factor its edge.
“Whereas most brands are stuck into a year or 18 months in a development cycle, one of the biggest advantages of having our own factory is that we can do this design and R&D phase, do the prototyping, test and then we can push the button on commitment only a handful of months away from going to market,” says Millar.
Shrive continues: “With the traditional model, wanting to ‘lock the BOM’ [bill of materials] is the big watchword. That’s when you’ve said, this is how much everything is going to cost, this is how much it’s going to weigh, these are the parts we’re going to put on it, this is how much money we’re going to make. They lock that in about 18 months out. Whereas we can be just-in-time in the whole vertical.”
“How small it is, number one, and how effectively innovation-led it is” says Millar. “We have no product management. We’re not doing an 18-month or two-year product map.”
Ownership of their factory not only accelerates the design process but it also removes the constraints that are unavoidable in the third-party OEM factory model.
“The typical thing in China,” says Shrive, is that the factory normally looks for about 30% profit. They want their margin to be 30%. Their overhead is typically 10-15%. From there the material-labour split is usually about 50-50 on a carbon bike. Because we own the factory that 30% just stays in our pocket… We import our own bikes and we assemble our own bikes… At the end of it, 65% of your cost basis is added on by what other brands see as necessary steps.”
He continues: “So for us, if a rim costs another $3, do we really care? A frame is an extra $50 or $100? It doesn’t really matter at that point. That’s what gives us this freedom to operate.”
The new gravel bike has a frame that will cost the same as the ONE’s frame, Shrive says. “Because I want to get the weight down and the stiffness up, we’re using 65-ton fibres from the Hanzō Track programme [when Factor made bikes for the Australian 2024 Olympic team], our base layers are all Textreme, our costs are now instead of 50-50 they’re something like 75 or 80% materials and 50% labour, because the labour rate is basically the same. So that’s the big background upside that we have.”
This brings Shrive full circle to his current task. “We have a potential fork for the new gravel bike that could be pretty wild. Before we went to the wind tunnel, we were like, we should probably try this ONE-style gravel fork. We had seen people on social media putting gravel front wheels into the ONE. So we 3D-printed one, put it in the tunnel and got pretty good results. Everyone who was at the tunnel who popped in or was there helping was like, that looks so cool! I thought, well, this might be a thing, so we cut a mould and now we’ve got prototypes for the test riders to try. I still don’t know, is a ONE-style fork going to beat you up or not?”
It's another illustration of Factor’s agility, the ability to iterate fast. Shrive talks of a “tremendous ownership and depth” within the company. “There’s always a story that led you to that point in the first place. And because there’s an individual that’s responsible for it, they can tell you that story. As opposed to ‘well, we sat in the committee and we looked at ten different versions’. It’s about not being afraid to just jump in, like we did with the ONE.”
As for how that fits with the full design process, Shrive says: “There will be crazy ideas that will be all over the place, we’ll start to narrow it down and narrow it down, and only then do we start the CAD. One of the things we’re not afraid to do is to go out and solicit. Sometimes we’ll just ask people, what do you think of this?”
He continues: “It's a tight team at this early point. Four of us in Canada, our design team in Taiwan is three or four people as well. We go through the CAD, start with one size, then the validation phase is really important to us. There’s CFD, physical validation at the wind tunnel, checking with the UCI, making sure it fits a front derailleur, a tyre, and then we’ll typically produce a 3D-printed full bike, we’ll hang parts on it and put it in the tunnel. Then the next part is called the detailing, which is done in Taiwan. These are not the guys you’ll ask to invent a new handlebar but they’ll put the cable hole in the exact right place. ‘We’ve got to change the draft angle on this cable hole because we can’t pull the tool back’. I’m beyond terrible at this stuff.” Finally the product is handed off to Millar as chief brand officer director and John Ebsen, the global sales manager.
The question has to be asked: why is Factor the only brand making bikes this way in its own factory? “It all stems from the fact that Rob comes from manufacturing,” says Millar. “The origin of Factor is as a manufacturing company. Most other brands start as a project with someone who’s not an engineer or a manufacturer. They always have to end up outsourcing to a factory. It’s very hard to do it the other way round. Most factories are locked into that OEM business and they don’t have the connections, the understanding of the sport.
“Because Rob is a former racer, he knew the culture and built a team around him – and now the amount of ex-pro cyclists in the company is ridiculous. So when you get to the crux of why Factor can do what no one else can, the reason is because we started out as a manufacturing company. And then we’ve become a brand. We’ve completely reverse engineered it.”
Shrive’s verdict: “It’s not just that other brands can’t compete with it, they can’t even conceive of doing business that way.”
And that is exactly what owning the factory does: it’s not just about accelerating prototypes, reducing costs or even making risk more palatable. It’s about wholly changing what feels conceivable.
