Specialized S-Works Turbo Creo SL e-bike

The S-Works Turbo Creo SL is a headline-grabber and a great-looking e-road bike. It's not all show: the new SL 1.1 motor system is very accomplished and a good match for the frame and fork. The new Future Shock 2.0 damping system is excellent, and the high quality build doesn't disappoint. If you can justify the spend – or, more likely, you don't have to justify it – then you're going to end up with a distinctive and well-rounded e-road bike. The other, lower-spec models offer better value for money, though.

So... let's deal with the elephant in the room first. At a penny under 11 grand, the S-Works Turbo Creo SL is the most expensive bike we've ever reviewed here on road.cc. When people say 'you could get a car for that!' when you're talking about your Sunday best bike that's worth a few thousand quid – or less, I find those conversations start even below four figures – your normal response is probably the same as mine: not a very good car. But you could get a six-year-old Mercedes E-Class for this sort of money. Or a brand new top-spec Dacia Sandero with all the options, and still have change for a bike rack. It. Is. An. Expensive. Bike.

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Let's not lose sight of the fact that this is the very top spec, though. Well, excluding the £13k Founder's Edition with its blingy gold bits and special certificate; they're all gone. If you want to get rolling on the carbon Creo SL platform then exactly half the cost of this bike is the entry point, and the £5,499 Turbo Creo SL Comp Carbon is exactly the same frame and fork, Future Shock and motor system. Okay, it's still a lot of money, but that bike is still a high quality build – mechanical Shimano GRX and DT Swiss R470 wheels – and all the things I'll go on to say about the frameset and motor are also true of that bike, and all the models in between. (There's also an aluminium Creo SL for £4,249.)

I'll start with the frameset and motor, because they're the heart of the bike and have been developed in tandem.

The SL 1.1 motor is a collaboration with German giant Mahle. You may not have heard of it, but the company makes a lot of things – like Bosch, your car probably has a dozen Mahle parts in it somewhere – and it's already heavily invested in the e-bike market having acquired ebikemotion in 2018.

The SL 1.1 is designed as a lightweight system. With 240W of peak output it's nowhere near as powerful as a top-end Bosch/Shimano/Brose motor, but the lighter weight of the motor and the 250Wh internal battery means that the bike in this build weighs in at an impressive 12.3kg (13.36kg with the piggyback battery).

Specialized says the Creo SL is "the lightest e-bike in its class", which is probably true if you define its class as mid-motor e-road bikes, but certainly isn't if you include all e-road bikes: the Ribble Endurance SLe that won the ebiketips e-road bike of the year award is the best part of a kilo lighter, and that wasn't even in the top-dollar build, just Shimano Ultegra Di2 and Mavic Cosmics. Just. Anyway, compared to something like the £6k Pinarello Nytro it's certainly light – you're saving two kilos. Of that, probably just under half is the motor system and the rest is the lighter kit that the S-Works Turbo Creo SL is wearing.

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The comparison to a Fazua-powered bike (the Nytro) is useful because in terms of motor systems the two are probably the closest match. The SL 1.1 isn't removable, but it's a similar beast: a lighter-weight mid-motor that's designed for lower-power and more rider input. The other similar motor is Bafang's M800, but we're not really seeing that on bikes coming into the UK yet.

That motor is built into a FACT 11r carbon frame; that's the same level of build as the other S-Works bikes, the ones that win Classics races and Tour de France stages. It's light and stiff, and built specifically for the SL1.1 motor. It's also, in this iridescent finish, a very pretty thing indeed. I got stopped by other riders pretty frequently, especially for the few hours it was sunny during testing.

There's plenty of tyre room in both frame and fork; the S-Works model uses the same frame and fork as the more gravel-oriented Turbo Creo SL Expert EVO which runs 38mm tyres as standard.

Geometry-wise, the Creo SL is similar to the Specialized Diverge, which is designed as a multi-surface bike with less aggressive angles and a Future Shock 2.0 damper at the front to soften the hits. The stack-to-reach ratio of the Creo SL I tested is about 1.6, which is more upright than a sportive bike (normally 1.4-1.5) or a race bike (1.4 or below). So it's not meant to feel too racy, but it's still fairly purposeful in the drops.

Power assistance

The SL 1.1 has a very good feel to it in terms of its power application. There are three assistance modes available from the top-tube-recessed control, which give you up to 100% assistance: if you're putting in 200W, the motor will add the same, up to its 240W limit.

Is that enough power? Well, it'll depend on what type of riding you do and how much assistance you want, but in reality the answer is going to be yes. This is the sort of bike that you'd buy expecting to make things easier but not effortless, and there's enough oomph coming from the bottom bracket to take you up some pretty serious climbs.

I pointed the Turbo Creo SL at the ridiculous cliff that is Prospect Place and it made it very manageable. Not easy, exactly, but a very different experience to the normal chin-on-the-stem, limit-of-your-powers climb that it normally is. So much so that when I rolled back down past the start of it half an hour later I could easily have done it again. And believe me, that's not normally a thing.

On less stupid climbs it's a useful helping hand. Sometimes on a powerful e-bike you can fly up the hills without even trying, and that's not how the Specialized feels, but the numbers don't lie: I can easily beat my fastest times on my local climbs without trying too hard. And if you're riding with other people it's simple to tailor the assistance and your effort to give yourself the ride that you want. On the climbs at least... Once you're over the assistance limit you're on your own, of course. When that happens it's a lot more enjoyable to be on a lighter e-road bike than a heavier one, and the Turbo Creo SL is easy enough to wind up to speed. There's no real noticeable resistance from the motor unit when it's not assisting.

On a rolling 6km section that's gradually downhill but with some kicks back up, the bike felt fast and planted, and getting up out of the saddle to power over the rises was rewarding – I only slowed enough for the motor to kick in once. There's more mass in the bike and it's noticeable, but it behaves like a road bike should. It's easy to pilot, and easy to forget it's an e-bike: sometimes you'll be rolling along a flat bit and the motor will kick in as you hit a rise, and you'll have forgotten all about it. Well, I did anyway.

Not so stealthy

When it does kick back in you'll be made aware of how noisy it is. This certainly isn't the quietest motor system you can get, so if you're out on your e-road bike to convene with nature then you might find it a bit of a distraction. And obviously it makes stealth cheating harder. I go out riding with someone who owns an Orbea Gain with ebikemotion's X35 motor system, and you're never really sure how much effort he's putting in and how much the motor is contributing because you can't hear it most of the time. That's not a trick you can pull on the Creo SL. It's a little bit of a disappointment.

With its massively oversized down tube and chunky deep-section wheels, the S-Works Turbo Creo SL perhaps doesn't look like it'll get top marks for comfort, but in fact I found it a very comfortable bike to ride. The 28mm S-Works Turbo Cotton tyres are a great start, big enough to kill some of the chatter, and light and supple enough to feel fast. I was riding the smaller of the two sizes I'd be comfortable on, and that meant plenty of seatpost showing which helps to tame the back end. I wasn't a huge fan of the saddle, but if you're dropping 11 grand on a bike you can probably ask for whatever saddle you want.

The star of the show, though, is the Future Shock 2.0. "With the Future Shock 2.0, you'll feel a reduction in fatigue and an increase in speed, no matter the terrain," says Specialized, and it's true: you do. I wasn't the biggest fan of the non-adjustable original version of the Future Shock but the new model, which allows you to dial in the damping and even lock the unit out, is a huge improvement. (You can see it in action here.)

I mostly ran the shock two or three clicks from locked, which I found was perfect for the mostly road riding that I put the Creo SL through. It has enough travel to soak up even some fairly large hits from unexpected potholes, and is much less prone to bobbing when you're out of the saddle than its predecessor. It's a big improvement, and a really welcome addition to the bike, especially when you're on a long ride pushing the limit of the Creo SL's range.

Range

Range, of course, is a very elastic concept when it comes to e-road bikes. This is a machine you can propel by yourself a lot of the time, and you'll have to when you're riding above 25km/h anyway. With a 250Wh internal battery and an additional 160Wh from the bottle-cage-mounted piggyback battery, the bike has plenty of capacity. My first ride on the Creo SL was a 40km loop with 600m of climbing, and that accounted for about a third of the battery; that was without me being especially cautious with the mode choice. So rides of over 100km are within range just in normal use.

To prove that – and because it was the only decent day for about three weeks – I took the Creo SL out on a loop of my favourite Mendip roads. It's a pretty tough loop: 105km, with over 1,600m of climbing including the normally deeply unpleasant New Road out of Draycott to the gliding club (top tip: any road that goes to a gliding club is probably bad news).

The S-Works made it round with a bit of juice to spare, and I hadn't been particularly careful with the assistance. Save for the first half hour when I kept the motor off to warm up a bit on a cold day, I kept the assistance on all the time at a low level, and ramped it up to maximum for the climbs. Without the smaller 160Wh piggyback battery I'd have been struggling, but the flip side of that is that without it I'd have been more careful to preserve the juice, doing a bit more of the work myself.

It's worth noting again at this point that it's not a free ride: the climbs were much, much easier than they would be on a standard bike, but over four hours of riding still feels like a workout even on an assisted bike, and I was nicely tired by the end. The benefit of having the motor is that you can get to that final climb where you're starting to feel it, check your battery, see you have plenty left and whack it on full to get you home.

Drivetrain

One thing you'll have noticed is that the Creo SL comes with a single-ring drivetrain. The 46T ring mated with an 11-42 cassette gave enough range for me to crawl up the very steepest climbs in the area, and pedal at 60km/h down quick descents.

The cassette is quite gappy, and if you're used to the close ratios of a road bike it might take a bit of getting used to, but I never found it a problem. There was no point on a 100km ride with 80km/h downhills and 25% climbs that I felt short changed.

The Creo SL gets an 11-speed XTR Di2 derailleur mated with hydraulic Dura-Ace Di2 levers; that's the proper top-end spec you'd expect for a bike as expensive as this, and it's probably no surprise that I've only got good things to say about the shifting performance.

That being said, I found the Dura-Ace hydraulic brakes a bit more finicky than other lower-spec Shimano units. They seemed to be affected by road grit more and were a lot noisier overall than the Tiagra callipers I'm running on my winter bike. The stopping itself, however, was flawless.

Conclusion

Overall, I really enjoyed riding the S-Works Turbo Creo SL. It's a really well-executed e-road bike, and the SL1.1 motor is very capable and well matched to the bike overall. The Future Shock 2.0 damper at the front works well, and you can't really have any complaints about the spec of the bike: this is money-no-object stuff, after all.

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If it was my money, and I had to attempt to justify buying one, I'd fail. Is it a better bike overall than the Ribble Endurance SLe that ebiketips made e-road bike of the year recently? Having put some decent miles into both, I'd have to say that it's only a maybe; the two are broadly comparable in terms of their overall performance and it'll depend on what you prioritise. The Specialized is more comfortable, and the Ribble is lighter and more purposeful in its geometry. The SL1.1 motor system is certainly a higher-ticket item than the ebikemotion X35 motor in the Ribble, and having the motor in the hub creates minor issues with weight distribution and wheel removal that you don't get with a mid-motor.

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But even in a Dura-Ace Di2 build with deep-section Mavic carbon wheels – the closest build I can get to the Creo SL – the Ribble is just £5,499. Is the Specialized worth as much again on top? I'd say no. On top of that, speccing Dura-Ace Di2 over Ultegra Di2 – which for me is functionally indistinguishable – can only ever be about weight and kudos, not performance. While the weight saving (about 450g) could be considered meaningful in the rarified air of 7kg superbikes it's much less so when we're talking about a 12kg electric bike, light though that may be compared to its peers.

I guess the take-home here is that if you have to justify spending 11 grand on the Creo SL you probably won't be able to, and if you don't have to (or want to) justify it then you're not going to be disappointed: it's a really nice thing. The other bikes in the Creo SL range are better value and the specs make more sense; I'd love to try one of the gravel models. Ultimately, this money-no-object build is probably overkill for the type of riding it's likely to be doing. I doubt that'll stop Specialized selling out of them.

Verdict

Super-high-end e-road bike that performs with or without power