They say beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but sometimes the beholder also has cataracts, which is the only way anybody could possibly look at this thing and like what they see:
He wishes he hadn’t looked at the price, but I wish I hadn’t looked at the bike, because dear Lob that thing is atrocious:
Lug?
Lug!?!
This is what a lug should look like:
The things holding that Bastion together look like something you’d use to cook fish on the barbecue:
Who the hell designed that thing, David Cronenberg?
But hey, you can’t put a price on exclusivity.
Wait, actually you can, and it’s $27,000 Australian Quasi-Dollars™:
Bastion’s yearly output is limited to only 100 bikes, with each said to be individually engineered for the customer.
That means the Panterra is not only very exclusive, it’s also going to be very elusive as each bike comes with a seven-month lead time.
Pricing for the Panterra starts from AUD $27,000 – or approximately £14,300 / $18,594 (plus shipping/local taxes).
This seems like a really bad business model, because anybody paying that much money for a bike that ugly will demand the very latest technology, yet seven months is an eternity in Gravel Years, and at the current rate of “progress” every single thing about the Bastion will be obsolete before you even take delivery.
Meanwhile, remember the woman who was going to circumnavigate the globe via bicycle, even though you totally can’t circumnavigate the globe via bicycle?
Well, she’s already bailed, and apparently you can blame climate change:
In fact between the climate change and equity the entire sport of cycling may be doomed:
The spectre of climate change and rising temperatures has haunted cycling – a sport played out in the great outdoors – in recent years, with races increasingly susceptible to extreme weather conditions
Of course the Climate Apocalypse is already long past its due date:
But remember that the Tour de France has only lasted this long because they’ve gotten luckly:
In a new paper, published today in Scientific Reports, the researchers looked at the future of European outdoor summer sporting events through the lens of the past half century of the Tour de France, the country-crossing bike race acting as a near-perfect case study for the impact of climate change and extreme heatwaves on summer sport.
Looking at the analysis, the study suggests the Tour has been, thus far, actually quite fortunate to avoid the historical July days featuring the highest heat. This is, of course, down to chance and ASO cannot hope to continue to be lucky enough to avoid extreme heatwaves and the most dangerous conditions.
Oh, please. They’ve been putting on this ridiculous race since 1903, they’ve basically got a small city following them, and they see more doctors during a single stage than most people visit in their entire lifetimes. They’ll be just fine.
I mean sure, it’s already hot over there:
In fact it’s the hottest spring since they started keeping track in 1900:
France experienced its hottest spring “since records began in 1900,” marked by a scorching early heatwave at the end of May, the country’s weather service said on Tuesday, June 2. “With an average temperature of 13.8ºC, this spring of 2026 is the warmest ever recorded,” Météo France said in a briefing note covering the months of March through May. The season broke previous spring records set in 2011 and 2020, the weather service added.
But if you think that sounds bad just check out what things were like in 1900:
If the extreme heat didn’t get you then the rabies certainly would:
So basically, if you were attempting to circumnavigate the globe by bicycle in 1900, you’d have to abandon in France because the air was too thick with soot from the cat crematoriums:
Rabies is also extending itself to the thousands of more or less wild cats which infest the fortifications and the great cemeteries of Paris. To exterminate this pest some energetic measures have recently been taken. At Père La Chaise traps are set every night, and many cats are found caught in them the following morning by the cemetery guardians as they make their rounds. Poor pussy’s fate is then rather a cruel one. A cat has nine lives, and a cemetery guardian’s time is limited. So to settle the matter outright the guardian throws pussy still alive into the crematorium, where the heat is intense enough to get the better of the most tenacious existence quite quickly. Of course this practice has called forth violent denunciations from the lovers of animals, and I have no wish to defend it. I only trust that sentiment may not go too far, and that the plague of mad cats and mad dogs from which we are now suffering may soon be ended.
Yet only three years later they kicked off this whole Tour de France thing, and the very first stage was 467 kilometers long:
The roads sucked, the bikes sucked, and it was hot as balls, but at least it beat sweeping chimneys:
So basically if you were lucky enough to survive the heat and the rabies then maybe you could get a job sweeping out the chimney at the cat crematorium and then spend the summer riding a fixed-gear bicycle around the entire country of France, win, and use the prize money to buy a gas station. (I believe that’s what he ended up doing.)
That’s not to say I don’t worry about the future, but today we’re better off in pretty much every way, and the only thing that truly terrifies me about tomorrow is the bikes:
First it was the AI road bike, now it’s the double decker 32-inch mountain bike:
Hmm, if only there were already a type of handlebar that offered multiple hand positions… Maybe it could also be paired with a wheel size that didn’t require the bar to be integrated into the headtube.
No, that would be crazy, what am I even thinking?
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