Orro Terra C 105 Di2 2023

Orro's Terra C is a really accomplished gravel bike that's very capable both on the tarmac and off it, making it one of the best gravel bikes for UK gravel riding which often includes long road sections to link up the trails.

This build with the new Shimano 105 Di2 groupset is more or less perfect if you're splitting your time between the roads and the tracks, but if you're looking for a bike you can load up for longer adventures it's probably not the one for you. You can't have everything.

This is a bike we have previously reviewed on road.cc – the Terra C Adventure in 2020, and the Terra C GRX800 in 2021. As with the 2021 model, this frame features fully internal cable routing through the head tube, which makes for much cleaner lines and also means a fully internal cable run through the handlebars is possible, making it much easier to fit bar bags.

The frame uses the same carbon technology as before. It is built from Sigmatex carbon and it has Innegra inserts in crucial areas to guard against rock strikes and other trail damage. Innegra is a high modulus polypropylene fibre that improves the level of impact resistance. It's a mix of high and low modulus carbon, so the emphasis is on strength and ride quality rather than weight, although it's certainly not a heavy bike – this large build comes in at well under 10kg even with reasonably heavy wheels and a mid-range groupset.

The ride

Let's first talk about how this bike rides out on the roads and the trails. It's a very easy bike to get on with. I've done some big days on the Terra C on a wide variety of terrain and it's just a great bike to be aboard when you're mixing up your riding.

The riding position with the 71-degree head tube isn't too relaxed and on tarmac the bike feels quite purposeful. The stack height at the front of this large test bike is 612mm. On top of that the bike is running about 30mm of spacers. This gives a pretty comfortable position, but in the drops it's still quite aerodynamic.

In reality, I could probably ride either the large or the extra large frame. This large gives me a shorter reach and more drop to the handlebar which I prefer for the mix of road and off-road riding I've been doing. If I was looking for a bike to spend more time on on the road I would probably size up and get the rangier extra large.

> Bike geometry 101: Find out why stack & reach are important

The Terra C is very much at home on the road and on the trails. There's no judder from the carbon fork and the bike is very well behaved under braking. The seatstays aren't dropped, which is sometimes a way that bike manufacturers make the rear of a gravel bike more compliant, but with a fairly long exposed seatpost the rear end of the bike is well matched with the front.

It's not necessarily a bike that majors on damping technologies, but it does a really good job of filtering out trail buzz and also feels very planted when descending. Certainly, the front end is stiff enough that it's the tyres rather than the frame and fork that feel vague at speed, especially when running off-road pressures on the tarmac.

The Orro Terra C uses a press-fit bottom bracket which allows for a very wide shell and plenty of stiffness when transferring power to the pedals. It is a very efficient bike, and there is absolutely no sideways flex even when you're pushing hard up a steep off-road climb. That said, press fit is not my bottom bracket of choice for a bike like this which is designed to get dirty. I would rather see Orro adopt the newer threaded T47 standard for future versions. That also allows for a wide and stiff bottom bracket but is easier to service and less prone to creaking. Then again, I've not had any problems with the review bike.

Groupset

Our bike came with Shimano's new 105 Di2 groupset. There has been a lot of talk on road.cc about the pros and cons of switching to 12-speed and semi-wireless electronic shifting in Shimano's mid-range groupset. But there are no questions about the performance here – 105 Di2 is functionally indistinguishable from Shimano's higher end groupsets. Almost everything that you would want to trickle down from the top-end gear has made it to this level, and as a result it's a brilliant groupset to use. Shifting has been flawless throughout even under heavy load.

The braking from the new levers and callipers is also fantastic. The rotors took a little longer than normal to bed in, but now that they have the braking performance of this bike is as good as you could ever need. There's 10 per cent more pad clearance at the rotor and this means that dust and water that gets into the calliper makes less noise during your ride.

I found that the levers had a little bit more throw before they got to the bite point, but I actually preferred this over the feel of my mechanical 105 hydraulic levers. The position of the shifting buttons is more or less unchanged, with two long paddles behind each brake lever. With the first lever textured and raised slightly against the second, there is a little bit more delineation between the two than there has been in previous Di2 setups I've used.

However, I still find that the shifting positions of the Shimano buttons are the least intuitive of the three main electronic groupsets, and I still struggle to feel the difference of the buttons when I'm wearing gloves.

Because the function of the buttons is configurable using Bluetooth, you can set up your levers to work in different ways. I tend to set them up as a paddle shift, a bit like the SRAM setup, with the right lever shifting out and the left lever shifting in.

Gearing-wise, 105 Di2 is designed as a road groupset, and here you get a 50/34 chainset up front and an 11-34 cassette at the back. That's a good spread of gears, with a 1:1 bottom ratio, but if you're spending a lot of time off road then you'll probably find, like I did, that you'd be glad of a couple of lower gears at the expense of the top end.

The ideal setup would probably be a sub-compact chainset, something like a 46/30, but that's not currently an option with the 12-speed 105.

Wheels and tyres

Let's move on to the wheels. Bikes at this kind of price point often save money on the wheels and the tyres. And this is the case here, although I found the wheel and tyre setup to be very effective during testing.

The Fulcrum Rapid Red 900 wheels certainly aren't light, but they have proved to be strong and easy to set up tubeless.

The 40mm Continental Terra Trail tyres have a good all-purpose tread pattern and a decent sized air chamber for a bit of off-road comfort. They are a wire bead tyre so they're heavy, and I find that at lower pressures wire bead tyres tend to burp air more easily than folding beads when hitting larger rocks as the bead isn't as flexible.

Even so, they're easily good enough to keep on the bike until they wear down, when you can fit something lighter and more supple. The Terra C will take up to a 44mm tyre, which isn't huge these days but should be plenty for most mixed surface riding.

Versatility and value

It's a bike that'll definitely benefit from a wheel and tyre upgrade in time, and it's also a bike that you could keep two wheelsets in the shed for – it's light enough and purposeful enough to be a quick endurance road bike if you throw a set of slicks on it.

There are mudguard mounts front and rear, so you can press it into service as a winter road bike and then throw some bigger tyres on for those dusty summer gravel rides. It's a very versatile machine.

If you're specifically looking for a bikepacking bike then this probably isn't it. There are rear rack mounts, but limited to a 5kg load, and there are no mounting points on the fork for carrying stuff at the front. It's not like you can't load it up – you could still get a decent amount of luggage on board with, say, a Tailfin rear bag, a full-length frame bag and a bar roll, but your options are just a bit more limited compared with other bikes in the market.

If bikepacking is a lesser concern then this bike really does have a lot going for it. It's fun to ride, it's comfortable, it's reasonably light and it's very well priced. Three grand isn't chump change, but if you're looking for a carbon gravel bike with an electronic groupset then there aren't that many in the same ballpark.

Ribble's CGR SL comes in a similar build for the same money, and we'll be reviewing that bike soon, but most of your other options are significantly more. Cannondale's Topstone Carbon comes in a SRAM Rival AXS build but it's nearly five grand, for example, and a Rival AXS build of the Specialized Diverge is £6,500. Both of those are great bikes, and feature some interesting damping tech, but the Orro looks like a bit of a steal by comparison.

Conclusion

Overall, it's easy to like the Terra C, and I've very much enjoyed riding it. I'll be sad to see the back of it. Not everything's perfect, but it's a brilliant bike for the money, and if what you want is something that's fast and capable over a wide range of surfaces then this frame with this build is hard to beat. Save up for some nicer wheels and tyres, and stick some slicks on the old hoops for winter road duties, and you've got a bike that'll be first out of the shed nearly every time.

Verdict

Quick and versatile gravel bike that's good value in this electronic build