It’s no secret that I have a silly obsession with 1x road bikes and I’ve been preaching the way of 1x for years. I’m fully aware that 1x road bikes are pretty niche, and they won’t take over the world of cycling anytime soon. Slowly but surely though, they are gaining a bit of acceptance.
Though rare, I have met a few other riders who also love the simplicity of the 1x lifestyle. I’ve also been noticing a few more 1x road bikes making their way through TPC each month too. Recently, they’ve even been used in pro racing by Primoz Roglic and Jonas Vingegaard in the Giro d’Italia and Tour de France. These days, I don’t feel so alone on my 1x road bike.
So of course, when I saw this unique 2018 Lightweight Urgestalt Disc with a 1x SRAM Rival XPLR drivetrain come through TPC, I just had to pull it aside to get some beauty shots.
We’ll get into the 1x build later, but the highlight here is definitely the Urgestalt frame itself. It's fairly rare, and I appreciate it because there are no frills or gimmicks. It just focuses on low weight, racey geometry, and a snappy ride quality. Because of this, I like to consider the Urgestalt a spiritual predecessor to my own road bike: the Specialized Aethos.
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Lightweight: A Legendary Wheel Brand
Lightweight is a German brand best known for its super expensive and super lightweight (lowercase) carbon wheels. If you’ve been following bike racing for a while, then you might know that Lightweight (uppercase) wheels were among the most desirable race wheels of the late 90s and early 00s.
Johan Museeuw winning the 1996 road world championships on Lightweight wheels.
They took riders to podium finishes in the 1996 Olympics, and that year, Johan Museeuw won the world championships on a set of Lightweights. The wheels were also used on key Tour de France stages by several Tour winners: Bjarne Riis, Jan Ullrich, and Lance Armstrong. While there were plenty of other performance enhancements that were used in these victories, Lightweight wheels were legal, extremely effective, and available to the public.
Egan Bernal and the Ineos Grenadiers used Lightweight Meilenstein Obermayer wheels in the 2019 Tour de France. Photo: A.S.O./Pauline Ballet
More recently, Lightweight made headlines when the Ineos Grenadiers ditched their sponsor-correct Shimano wheels for Lightweight Meilenstein Obermayer wheels on tough climbing stages in the 2019 Tour de France (which they won with Egan Bernal).
Photo: Zwift Insider
For fans of Zwift, you may recognize Lightweight’s Meilenstein as the fastest and most desirable climbing wheels in the game. They're highly coveted because they can only be acquired as a random prize after completing the Alpe du Zwift.
The Lightweight Story
Heinz Obermayer. Photo: Lightweight
Lightweight got its start back in 1964 when two German engineers, Rudolf Dierl and Heinz Obermayer, started building aerodynamic sports car components like bumpers and spoilers from glass fiber reinforced plastic. The pair made their first bike component in the mid-80s when a friend suggested they produce glass fiber covers for the rear wheels of bicycles. These covers were originally intended to protect children from sticking their feet into the spokes, but triathletes ended up using these rear wheel covers to create aerodynamic disc wheels for their TT bikes.
After dabbling a bit in building sulky wheels for horse racing (the sulky is a two-wheeled cart pulled by the horse), Dierl and Obermayer transitioned fully to producing bicycle wheels, starting with an aero disc wheel for triathlons and time trials. In 1993, Dierl and Obermayer developed their first spoked wheel made of carbon, which quickly received UCI certification in 1994. The iconic deep-section aero wheels that Lightweight has become most known for came soon after.
A closer look at how Lightweight bonds its bladed carbon spokes to its carbon hub shells.
Beyond low weight, the feature that has made Lightweight wheels so famous is the use of bladed carbon fiber spokes which are bonded directly to the rim and hub. This design means that Lightweight wheels are among the lightest wheels available, and most importantly they didn’t sacrifice stiffness or aerodynamics to shed weight.
The Lightweight Urgestalt: The Aethos Before It Was Cool?
Lightweight decided to try its hand at framebuilding in 2013 with its Urgestalt road frame. The name “Urgestalt” means “original form’” in English, and it is a reference to CarbonSports’ (Lightweight’s modern-day corporate owners) origins as a frame-building company. In the early 2000s, CarbonSports founder Erhard Wissler took over the Dornier aircraft factory in Germany, which for whatever reason, came with a number of bicycle frame molds.
After his aircraft business folded in the wake of 9/11, Wissler tried using the molds to build and sell bikes. While this business venture ultimately wasn’t successful, his attempts attracted enough interest from investors for him to be able to set up CarbonSports, which eventually took over the production of Lightweight wheels in 2003 when Dierl left the company and a year before Obermayer retired.
The Urgestalt frame was first released in 2013. It has remained relatively unchanged except for an update in 2017, when a disc brake version was released. It continued to be available in Lightweight’s catalog until it was discontinued in 2021.
In Lightweight’s own marketing copy, it described the Urgestalt as a frame made to “frame the wheels.” So, of course, it had to be exceptionally light without sacrificing stiffness, just like its wheels. To achieve this, the Urgestalt doesn’t use any aero tube shapes, fancy gimmicks, or proprietary parts. It's just a classic diamond-shaped frame with race-oriented geometry and round tubes. The carbon is laid up and tuned with stiffness and ride quality as the main focus.
Classic, pencil-thin, non-dropped seatstays.
If that sounds familiar, it should, because it’s essentially the same design principles behind the more recent and mega-popular Specialized Aethos. I’m an Aethos lover and I own one myself. It’s a big reason I’m attracted to the Urgestalt in the first place — the two bikes are actually quite similar.
This 1x Lightweight Urgestalt and my 1x Specialized Aethos (right) are so similar.
The similarities are especially evident when it comes to price. An Urgestalt frameset retailed for around $5,000 USD, putting it on par with the S-Works Aethos. The ride quality is fairly similar too, though I’d say the Urgestalt favors all-out stiffness a bit more than the Aethos, which has a slightly springier feel.
In terms of weight, the thing you’d expect the Lightweight to excel in, the Aethos does actually beat it out. The Urgestalt frame had a claimed weight of 790 grams while the Aethos has a claimed frame weight of 585 grams for the S-Works frame and 699 grams for the standard frame.
In fact, the Lightweight Urgestalt wasn’t even the lightest frame of its day. When it was first released, it was bested by the super-premium Cervelo RCA (667 grams - but also twice the price), the Trek Emonda SLR (690 grams), and the Cannondale SuperSix Evo Hi-Mod (700g).
Still, the Urgestalt is hardly a pig. With a fairly portly build, the 54cm bike we have here weighs in at a respectable 16 lbs 13 oz. Higher-end builds can easily come in under the 14.99 lb UCI weight limit. Of all the featherweight frames that I’ve mentioned though, I do think the Urgestalt definitely stands out the most. It’s the most niche, and in my mind, the coolest.
The 1x Build: Budget Brilliance or Blasphemy?
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The Urgestalt is a lightweight premium frame, so most riders would probably say that it deserves lightweight premium components. Apparently, the original owner of this Urgestalt felt a bit differently. This bike has a fairly modest build: a SRAM Rival AXS XPLR drivetrain with Roval Rapide C 38 carbon wheels.
Rival AXS is SRAM’s mid-range electronic drivetrain, with Force and RED above it. It’s also the heaviest AXS group, weighing around 200-500 grams more than its high-end counterparts.
XPLR is the 1x version of the drivetrain designed for gravel racing, which uses a 10-44t cassette. I used an XPLR drivetrain on my own 1x road bike and Primoz Roglic used XPLR on his 1x road bike in the 2023 Giro. When paired with the 46t chainring, the drivetrain actually has slightly more gear range than a more traditional 50/34t compact chainset paired with an 11-32t cassette.
1x drivetrains are most efficient in the middle of the cassette.
The big critiques against a 1x setup like this generally center around the bigger jumps between gears due to the wide-range cassette, and higher chain angles (which create more friction and chain wear) in the high and low gears of the cassette. But 1x converts like me generally aren’t bothered by these issues. In fact, I don’t even consider them issues.
Personally, the simplicity and uniqueness of 1x is the main attraction. Also, the ability to easily swap chainrings to get easier gearing is quite nice. Roglic, for example, downsized to a 40t chainring to get a super easy 40x44t climbing gear for the final uphill time trial where he won the 2023 Giro. I also think the simplicity of 1x matches a simple frame like the Urgestalt very well, and the lack of an AXS front derailleur and a second chainring certainly help keep the overall weight down.
While using a 1x drivetrain on a road bike is surely controversial, equipping this Lightweight Urgestalt frame with Roval Rapide C 38 wheels is a much greater offense in my eyes. As stated earlier, the Urgestalt was built to showcase Lightweight’s star product — its wheels. To not put a set of Lightweight wheels on this frame feels a bit blasphemous to me.
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The Rapide C 38 is Roval’s entry-level carbon wheel, which weighs around 1,600 grams. In comparison, the Lightweight Meilenstein Evo comes in at 1,380 grams, which would be a significant decrease in weight, while the Lightweight Obermayer Evo is only 1,230 grams.
I get it though. Depending on the model, Lightweight wheels generally retail anywhere from $5,000-8,000 new, which is absurdly expensive. They make other premium wheels in the same weight category — wheels like the ENVE SES 2.3 or Roval Alpinist CLX II — seem cheap in comparison.
Lightweight wheels are extremely niche, and the type of person who will buy them wants Lightweights, not because they perform better than a wheel with traditional steel spokes, but because they stand out and provide the feeling of exclusivity. Likewise, that is probably the same type of rider who’d want a Lightweight Urgestalt frame too. While this Urgestalt first caught my attention as a 1x road bike, it piqued my interest more because of its budget-oriented build.
Interestingly, the budget build means this Urgestalt is currently being offered at a surprisingly low price ($3,799.99). If I didn’t already have an Aethos with a very similar build, I’d probably have already added this bike to my collection. And I'm definitely tempted, because I do think this bike is cooler and more unique than my Aethos.
Of course, I wouldn’t be able to resist upgrading it to shed grams. I’d likely have to sell two or three of my other bikes just to pick up a proper set of Lightweight wheels to complete this build the way I think it should be done.
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