Welcome to Velo’s Sea Otter Classic coverage, where we share our favorite things we’ve seen at the 2025 show. Bikes, components, everything racing, and more: if we think it’s cool, you’ll see it. See the rest of our coverage here.
In our search for bike checks ahead of the first Life Time Grand Prix gravel race of the season at Sea Otter Classic, we came across Lauren Stephens and her race bike for 2025. And as we took a peek, we found a few changes to this bike that make us think she is riding an unreleased Ventum gravel bike.
Stephens will ride a Ventum GS1 in the Fuego XL in 2025, the first Life Time Grand Prix gravel race of the year. The bike will receive the same stars, stripes, and colors to celebrate her US Gravel National Championship wins in 2023 and 2024.
What might be more interesting than the paint scheme, however, is that this is what appears to be an unreleased Ventum gravel bike. It looks an awful lot like the Utah based brand’s existing GS1 gravel bike, just with a few key changes.
The changes we can see here appear to be mostly refinements of the existing formula: racey fit and handling geometry, aero tube shapes, and good tire clearance. Take a look at the head tube and it’s no longer the Coke can-like head tube of before; rather, there’s some real-deal tube shaping to narrow the center of the head tube between the upper and lower bearings. The fork retains its straight profile as well, though it appears to ditch the handling-adjusting flip chip of the current GS1.
The most interesting difference here might be the tire clearance. While the current Ventum GS1 officially fits a 700c x 48 mm tire, Stephen is running a 47 mm wide Vittoria Terreno gravel tire with tons of room to spare. I wouldn’t be surprised if this bike were rated to fit at least a 50 mm tire.
And the bottom bracket bottle cage mount? That’s gone, too, with Ventum joining a growing list of brands ditching the mount.
Also worth noting is that this new Ventum GS1 looks like it’ll fit a 160 or a 180 mm brake rotor, rather than the 140 mm or 160 mm rotors of most gravel bikes. The 160 mm rotors here are mounted without an adapter out back and with the front caliper set in its lower mount.
While we weren’t able to get a tape measure to confirm similarities, the basic geometry of the two bikes appears very similar.
Truth be told, this bike doesn’t look a whole lot different from the current Ventum GS1. But the changes here seem to amount to small refinements to a package that many seem already happy with.
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