Merida could have halted the new Silex’s marketing campaign after Matej Mohorič won the 2023 Gravel World Champs aboard one. By the Slovenian’s own admission – never mind his bike sponsor’s amazement – he wasn’t really supposed to win, and it might be fair to say the new Merida Silex wasn’t supposed to win either.
But then, as I learned over three days testing the Silex in the gravel hills of Italy, that’s the thing. The Silex is way more capable than the average gravel bike.
The headlines here are as follows: Max tyre size 700c × 45mm (or 42mm with mudguards); dropped chainstays; 1× and 2× compatible; multiple fork and frame luggage mounts; dropper post compatible; option for fully integrated cables with an FSA ACR/SMR cockpit (though as is, cables are all but hidden); 180mm disc rotors as standard; internal front dynamo hub routing; alloy Silex frame version. Carbon frame weight a claimed 1,220g, alloy frame 1,900g, fork weight 580g.
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But honestly, those are the least telling elements of the Silex. Rather, this bike is best understood through its geometry.
‘It’s mountain bike-inspired,’ says the Silex’s product manager, Hannes Noller. ‘That means the top tube is long and the head tube angle is slack. We’ve made it so you could swap in a short-travel suspension fork and it wouldn’t upset the geometry.’
In numbers, that means the medium Silex I rode here has a 580mm top tube and 69.5° head tube – a full 1.5° slacker than the outgoing Silex. Add in 430mm chainstays and the wheelbase comes out at 1,082mm, and compare those numbers to an aggressive hardtail MTB and you start to see the Silex’s leanings.
Furthering that MTB feel – and the reason this ostensibly 58cm bike fits me when I usually ride a 56cm – is the 80mm stem, which is the same size across all frame sizes. This brings the overall reach back to something that fits me (a 56cm road bike would tend to have a 100/110mm stem) while sharpening up the handling. The fork here has an 45mm offset, meaning trail is a huge, and otherwise slow-handling, 87mm; short stems tend to quicken up how handling feels as a small movement of the bars elicits a greater turn of the wheel compared to a longer stem.
As an aside, ‘this bike’ is the second-tier Silex 7000, the flagship being the SRAM Red/Eagle AXS equipped Merida Silex 10K (which actually only costs £8,750). This Silex 7000 was pre-production and hence will have some spec changes when it arrives in the UK – the DT Swiss wheels will Easton EA70 AX, for example, while the 2× Shimano GRX 820 Di2 groupset will be 1x.
First rides
Over the three days testing we hit everything from beautifully smooth tarmac to very chunky gravel, and it didn’t take long to feel that MTB-esque geometry playing its part.
On the initial stretches of road, and always finding it hard not to compare any bike on tarmac with a road bike on tarmac, the Silex felt upright and ponderous to accelerate. But as the tarmac wore on, this gave way to a feeling of smooth momentum – 45mm tyres and a 9.8kg bike will do that cruisy thing for you. Hit the off-road, though, and the Silex finds its feet.
Draggy sections of gravel felt almost as smooth as the road, and in that, the Silex suddenly felt fast. Sure, this bike isn’t aero, but the natural body position it served up doesn’t feel all that different to more race-oriented gravel bikes. Then longer geometry, while not adding any speed in terms of physics does – in my experience – tend to help with a feeling of speed as the bike bowls along with more straight-line stability than a shorter (and hence more skittish) bike.
That sensation really ramps up in the turns, through which the Silex remained poised and composed, testament to the unflappable 87mm trail. Such assured handling probably does add speed on dirt, as it means a rider has more confidence to push hard through turns.
Gears and climbing
This particular Silex has been built around a 2× Shimano GRX Di2 groupset, with a 46/30 crankset and 11-34 cassette, but the bikes that will ship to the UK will be 1× GRX, with a 42t chainring and 11-51 cassette. So while my already tiny 30×34 gear (ratio 0.88) wasn’t quite as small as the production bikes’ 42×51 (0.82), it wasn’t far off, meaning when we came to off-road climbs, the Silex performed like a boat-winch.
It's interesting to note here that the maximum recommended chainring size is 46t, albeit Mohorič was running a 50/34 on his World Champs Silex, and had just about enough clearance.
In some respects the gearing would suggest the Silex could climb walls, but there’s another feature that’s coming into play when an 80kg man wants to ride up a 14% incline strewn with rocks and roots. You guessed it: geometry. I could really feel the Silex’s longer wheelbase helping me out with grip, which is obviously essential when climbing on a steep, loose surface.
It’s not that wheelbase per se somehow creates more grip, it’s rather that a longer wheelbase means you can get out of the saddle and pedal hard, throwing the bike all over the place, and have more room for error – that is, error in terms of weight distribution.
Put your weight too far forward over the bars and the rear wheel spins; put your weight too far back and the front wheel lifts. What a longer-wheelbase bike does is provide more ‘space’ to play with in between those two points.
So far so very accomplished, and I could really feel the mountain bike slant, the Silex reminding me of what it was like riding rigid MTBs, only better as old MTBs' brakes were crap. Speaking of which…
Brakes and extras
Merida has chosen to spec 180mm rotors front and rear (I’d usually expect 160mm), which Noller says is because ‘bigger rotors manage heat better and they work better with a loaded bike, but they only weigh a few grams more, so why not?’. Smaller 160mm rotors will also fit if you remove the mounts, but that does mean doing away with Merida’s Disc Cooler brake mount.
The Disc Cooler – a signature Merida feature – is designed to operate like a heat sink, sitting sandwiched between frame/fork and calliper so as to dissipate heat through a finned aluminium surface. Tellingly, you’ll not see Disc Coolers on most Merida pro bikes, and when I asked Noller about its function, he said something along the lines of ‘well it doesn’t not help heat management.’ But dubious addendums aside, I was impressed by the bikes braking, and I’d reckon the rotors helped.
We rode in some 30°C+ heat down some really sketchy gravel and brakes never faded, nor can I think I slid the rear wheel out more than twice. Testament to how well-modulated the power is, and also how grippy the tyres – the 45mm Maxxis Ramblers are some of my favourites for dry, loose conditions.
Elsewhere there have been some other nice touches. The frame features a recessed bottle cage area on the down tube specifically designed to fit the Fidlock magnetic bottle system, where a bottle locates on two studs. A blanking plate is supplied for those wishing to use regular cages systems.
Under the Merida’s own saddle is a hidden multitool, and meanwhile the thru-axle levers detach to reveal a 6mm hex wrench that slims to a 4mm at its tip. It all speaks to the other thing the Silex is positioned at: utility. And I believe it. Noller says he rode Badlands on a loaded up Silex – the 800km, 16,000m climbing, unsupported gravel race across Spain.
Descending
For all the cruisy road comfort, the high-level of climbing grip, where the Silex excels is going downhill. I’d have happily opted for a hardtail MTB given some of the gravel tracks we were on – large, loose stones, puddles of gravel, washy turns and tree roots aplenty – but it turned out the Silex was all the bike I needed.
It’s over such terrain that a 9.8kg gravel bike goes from feeling like a portly dropbar bike to a super-light mountain bike. The Silex nipped and darted with assuredness, the short 80mm stem coming into its own to liven to quicken up handling when needed, the long trail and wheelbase helping the Silex to stay composed as it bumped around at speed under a less than technically accomplished rider.
I could go on to dissect how the Silex descends, but that’s the nub of it. I’m ok at riding downhill off-road, I’d get a 'satisfactory' from Ofsted, but what the Silex did was provide a brilliant ‘hold and hope’ platform. Mess up a line and the bike would keep you upright; want to go that little bit faster, brake that little bit later? The bike will make up for your shortcomings in technique.
Once again, the thing felt like a mountain bike.
Back on the road
Given all this, the Silex wasn’t the quickest on the road, but it was oddly faster than I’d expected, and I even took it on one predominantly-road ride and by the end I’d all but forgotten I was riding a gravel bike. That’s the way of these things though, you get used to what you ride.
So bearing that thought in mind, I’ve come away from this three day test with the idea that for those whose gravel riding regularly strays into the back of beyond – but does take some more pedestrian stuff to get there – the Silex could be the perfect bike. Or if you want to win a World Champs, it would likely work too.
Merida Silex spec
| Frame | Silex II CF2 |
| Fork | Silex II CF2 |
| Price | £5,250 |
| Weight | 9.8kg (medium) |
| Sizes available | XS, S, M, L, XL |
| Levers | Shimano GRX RX820 Di2 |
| Brakes | Shimano GRX RX820, 180mm rotors |
| Rear derailleur | Shimano GRX RX822 |
| Crankset | Shimano GRX RX820 46/30 |
| Bottom bracket | Shimano BBR60 |
| Cassette | Shimano GRX 11-34 |
| Chain | Shimano M7100 |
| Wheels | DT Swiss GR1600 |
| Tyres | Maxxis Rambler 45mm TR EXO |
| Bar | Merida Expert GRII 420mm |
| Stem | Merida Team CC III alloy 80mm |
| Seatpost | Merida Expert CC |
| Saddle | Merida Expert SL |
