Giant Bicycles experts discuss the Defy Advanced SL 0

Both Jon Swanson and Doug Barnett know a thing or two about the 2015 Giant Defy Advanced SL 0. As the Giant’s global category manager for road, Swanson oversaw the engineering of the new frame. Barnett, global road product marketing specialist, knows the bike inside and out and can speak to its features.

The latest Defy line debuted in the summer of 2014 at a launch in Scotland and has received a bit of testing by Canadian Cycling Magazine. It’s a performance machine that keeps the road from beating you up. The frame’s tube shapes are engineered to provide the necessary stiffness for power transfer and for making sure the bike tracks well in the turns. Those tubes also have some compliance that dissipates road vibrations that can hasten rider fatigue.

“We started from scratch,” Swanson said of the design process for the new Defy. “We took the existing model and we took away everything except the geometry and started over. The main reason for that is that we were switching to complete disc brakes. All the carbon bikes have disc brakes on them.”

“The disc brakes we were able to add and actually shave weight, while many of our competitors are adding 50 to 100 g to their framesets,” Barnett said. “We were actually able to shave 80 g from our existing Defy framesets.”

A central feature of the Defy frame is the D-Fuse seatpost. It’s D-shape allows for flex fore and aft, while remaining rigid side to side. While the design was always intended for Giant’s endurance line of bikes, it made its debut on the Taiwan-based company’s cyclocross bike, the 2014 TCX Advanced Pro. “We tested that in the harshest condition in the world,” Barnett said, “like underneath our World Cup cyclocross riders, like Lars van der Haar. After a year on the [2013–14] circuit, he won the overall World Cup, so we feel the design is truly proven in the toughest conditions, the roughest surfaces, and will work really well for endurance riders on the road.”