Words and photos by Mark Alker.
Price: £1,499/€1,799/$1,999
weight: 9.84KG
size tested: 53
konaworld.com
Kona tends to make bikes that have unique characteristics. They manufacture the usual range of market-leading bikes as you would expect, but they also like to throw in a curveball and brighten up their ranges with something that makes you take a second look. And so it is with the Private Jake. Glance #1: You see a cyclocross bike all in black. Glance #2: You spot that it’s a 1×11 bike with nothing to hang a front mech on. It’s also a frame that is singlespeed-ready, if you want it to be, with sliding rear dropouts. It’s also got thru axles front and rear (12×142 rear and 15×100 at the front). Those are the standout features, but there’s more. The slack (70.5°) and tapered head tube for a start. Then there’s the super-short rear chainstays (420mm through the size range) and finally clearance for 40mm tyres – there’s more than a hint at a mountain bike influence going on here.
The frame is 7005 aluminium with internal cable routing in the top tube that leaves the underside nice and comfortable for shouldering the bike. The fork is carbon, and the groupset is SRAM Rival. With it being 1x there’s nothing getting in the way of the left brake lever by way of shifting. That makes things clean, with fewer cables around. Shifting on the right hand lever takes some getting used to if you’ve not experienced the unique operation of the Doubletap Rival shifter – shifting up and down is done with the same throw of the shift paddle; you just shift a full throw to shift up, and half a throw to shift down. But like most things that SRAM does, it does make sense in the end, and once your brain has learned how to do it, shifting becomes easy and you start to appreciate the simplicity of the system.
At the other end of the Rival levers are two Tektro brake callipers providing stopping via 160mm front and 140mm rear discs. The front brake hose is internally routed through the fork. Tektro is normally associated with tight budgets, but coupled with the Rival levers they performed excellently. It’s usually tough to match the rear feel to that of the front, due simply to the difference in cable length between them. But with the Private Jake, the pull of both levers is pretty close to indistinguishable, and just as importantly, smooth. Braking on the hoods is easy, and there’s plenty of modulation in the braking power – there’s no stick-in-the-spokes-like braking here.
The ride is stiff – aluminium frames tend to be harsh, but with the square section chain stays, wide section tubing and the super-stiff thru axles, this bike transfers every twitch and movement you put into an action. The result is that power is transferred from your pedals to the rear as efficiently as possible and cornering is excellent – there’s just no give at all in this frame. That does mean that the ride is a little harsh on the road, but take it off road and it excels at pretty much every aspect of off-road riding when you want to push your limits.
Riding a wide-ratio 11-speed cassette with only one ring at the front is different. Personally I love the simplicity of the whole no-front-shifting thing, both in terms of the lack of cockpit clutter and the ease of shifting. Taking away that decision-making process of deciding when best to shift from one ring to the other is liberating. If you race, then removing the time to shift front rings, let alone the decision-making process of when to do that, is pretty much a winning choice – but even for just messing about in the woods, it allows you to think more about the riding than the bike. What’s not to like? You could, of course, fit a front mech if you really wanted to but really, that would change the characteristic of this bike too far. Don’t do it. Embrace the simple.
Overall, this bike is about simplicity – from the 1x groupset and DoubleTap shifting to the option to go ‘uber’ simple and run it singlespeed. But simple doesn’t need to lead to a lack of performance – this bike is a serious piece of kit. And it has a fun side too, if you decide to dispense with ten of those 11 gears altogether. After all, performance is important, but what’s the point of performance if you can’t also have fun along the way?