Bossi Strada SS cast titanium road bike

Bossi Strada SS uses heavily hydroformed tubes and cast titanium frame parts to create unique carbon-like silhouette

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By Jack Luke

Published: August 8, 2020 at 3:00 am

The Bossi Strada SS is a titanium road bike that – uniquely – uses cast frame parts and hydroformed tubes, giving the frameset an almost carbon-like silhouette.

In designing the bike, Bossi wanted to make something that "bridges the performance gap to carbon while still maintaining the magical titanium ride quality", all while remaining – in the context of high-end titanium bikes – competitively priced.

Though it will take a bang-on-trendy 30mm-wide tyre, the Summit SS is absolutely focused on road racing. The Australian brand's Grit gravel bike, Summit endurance road bike and round-tubed Summit road bike cover all other key disciplines.

Alongside framesets, Bossi also produces a line of carbon wheelsets, forks and titanium finishing kit.

Rather than mitring and welding the main tubes onto a conventional round head-tube and bottom bracket shell, these parts instead include ‘the roots’ of each tube. These parts are then sleeved into the tubes, welded and linished (essentially ground back with a belt sander) to a smooth and seamless finish.

The rear triangle uses typical welding around the bottom bracket and at the top of the seatstays.

The tubes themselves are hydroformed into "Kamm-like profiles" to improve aero performance (more on that in a moment) and double-butted to reduce the wall thickness while maintaining durability.

The process sounds similar to Specialized's Smartweld design as seen on its alloy Allez Sprint, but this is the first time we’ve seen it employed with titanium.

In fact, Bossi claims that "the Strada SS is the only frame we’re aware of that blends all of those elements together".

The construction is also said to reduce "hundreds of grams" from a typical welded titanium frame, with the Strada SS weighing a claimed 200g less than the brand's standard round-tubed Strada.

Bossi is up-front in saying that "the Strada SS has spent exactly zero minutes in a wind tunnel", adding that it has "no numbers for how much faster it is over a 40km time trial at 40km/h either".

This is a refreshingly open approach.

You’re unlikely to buy a bike like this for its aero chops and, either way, it's easier to believe an unquantified trust in well-known design principles than a marginal and caveated claim made for a bike ridden at a speed unachievable by most riders.

Indeed, the brand goes on to say "it's aero optimised, so more aero than a traditional round tube, but [we’re] not trying to tell people it's going to be a physics-defying weapon built to destroy everything in its class".

With that said, Bossi describes the bike as "incidentally aero", with the aero-shaped cast frame parts, fully internal cable routing and finishing kit all likely contributing to a reduction in drag, albeit a reduction that hasn't actually been tested or modelled.

Fair play, we say.

The Strada SS bike is built around a T47 threaded bottom bracket shell, allowing riders to use pretty much any crankset on the market without the potential headache of a press fit shell.

Similarly, the Summit SS is designed to work with mechanical, electronic or wireless groupsets, with all cables and hoses fully internally routed on the bike.

We’re happy to be proven wrong but, as far as we know, we think this is the only titanium road bike on the market with fully internal cable routing – if you know of another, please let us know in the comments.

The bike is available in a plain brushed finish or, if you want something a bit more bling, you have a pick of four different painted or anodised finishes:

At AU$5,499 (approximately £3,025 / $3,960 / €3,350 ), the frameset is definitely not cheap, but it's also not that far off what you would pay for a high-end road frameset from a mainstream manufacturer.

For that price, you get a frame, fork, seatpost and clamp, and headset.

The complete build as pictured – replete with SRAM's top-end Red eTap AXS groupset, Bossi RD1R wheels and the aforementioned Vision cockpit – would set you back a heady $14,499 (approximately £7,985 / $10,445 / €8,835).

Again, that's a whole lot of cash, but in an era when every brand launches a new model with an outrageous circa-£10k superbike, around £8,000 almost looks like good value… almost.

Deputy editor

Jack Luke is the deputy editor at BikeRadar and has been fettling with bikes for his whole life. Always in search of the hippest new niche in cycling, Jack is a self-confessed gravel dork, fixie-botherer, tandem-evangelist and hill climb try hard. Jack thinks nothing of bikepacking after work to sleep in a ditch or taking on a daft challenge for the BikeRadar YouTube channel. He is also a regular contributor to the BikeRadar podcast. With a near encyclopaedic knowledge of cycling tech, ranging from the most esoteric retro niche to the most cutting-edge modern kit, Jack takes pride in his ability to seek out stories that would otherwise go unreported. He is also particularly fond of tan-wall tyres, dynamo lights, cup and cone bearings, and skids. Jack has been writing about and testing bikes for more than six years now, has a background working in bike shops for years before that, and is regularly found riding a mix of weird and wonderful machines. Jack can also often be seen zooming about with his partner aboard their beloved tandem.

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