Fezzari is a small manufacturer in Utah that (like nearly every bike brand) outsources frame-making to Asia and quoted a reasonable-sounding 6-8 week delivery window. So I started to configure bikes and was torn between the Empire SL and Empire Elite series. The SL is the top-end frameset and has a much more elegant look, while the still-very-nice Elite could be had for a similar price with those oh-so-desirable deep-section carbon wheels.
After a little more research I opted for the high-end SL at the entry level, with a lighter frame and more refined cockpit but basic aluminum wheels. I figured I could easily upgrade to carbon wheels later and then I'd have a very serviceable backup set of wheels that maybe would get some use on gravel. There was only one hitch. I could get the basic black frame in 6-8 weeks but the beautiful Lava Rock Red color was backordered through February of 2022. Back in August of 2021 this seemed like an ETERNITY. But it just didn't make sense to order my forever bike in a color I wasn't in love with. So I sucked it up and ordered the SL Pro in the color I really wanted. And then I waited.
Finally, on January 31, 2022, my beautiful new bike arrived, a day earlier than promised! It even came with a little note inside the box:
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| Isn't that nice? |
As you can see, the bike was very well-packed and padded, and as I pulled it from the box I could see it had arrived fully intact, with nary a scratch or ding to be seen. It probably took longer to remove all the padding than it actually did to assemble the bike. All that was needed was to install the seat, bars, pedals, and front wheel, and it was ready to ride...
... almost.
That's because this bike came with SRAM Force eTap derailleurs and shifters, which meant the two derailleur batteries needed to be charged for an hour each before riding. After an hour I plugged the rear derailleur battery in and tested it out to see if it worked. It did! I could at least ride around the block while I waited for the front derailleur battery to charge. I hopped on and the shifting seemed... sluggish. I could probably shift my 1993-vintage steel-framed bike quicker than this! I wondered if I had really charged the battery properly. I went back to my garage and looked at the other battery in the charger. A blue light and a red light were on, but I could see there was also a yellow and a green light. Did I need to wait for the green light before it was fully charged?
It was at this point that I jarred from my memory banks a piece of wisdom my dad had shared with me 40+ years ago: "When all else fails, read the manual." I consulted the manual, and sure enough, the red light indicated the battery was NOT being charged. After some fiddling with the cords I got the yellow light to glow, indicating "charging." I would have to wait for the green light for this battery to be fully charged. It was already 4 pm, and I had two batteries to charge for a minimum of an hour each. I wouldn't be able to get a ride in before darkness. After making a self-deprecating post on the Pathetic Triathletes Facebook page I resigned myself to waiting until Tuesday to get a proper ride in.
In the meantime, I decided to spend a little more time familiarizing myself with the bike. I installed a Garmin mount and Varia headlight / taillight. I added two bottle cages (after some deliberation about which of the THREE provided mounts to use. You can install three cages on the bike, but there's not quite room for three, 24-ounce bottles. I think I will eventually get a third cage, though, since that is where I put my tool kit).
Around 6 pm I got everything charged up and installed the SRAM app on my phone, which then instructed me to upgrade the firmware on my derailleurs. After doing that, in the twilight, I finally rode my fully-operational bike around the block, before heading in for the night. Here's a photo of my setup:
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| Pretty! |
Tuesday dawned bitterly cold, so I had to wait until the afternoon before it was warm enough for a longer ride. It was still cold enough that I decided to wear my lobster-claw gloves, which would make for a nice test of the ergonomics of the shifters.
As I finally launched myself onto the open road, I noticed the ride seemed a bit rough. I was feeling every bump through the wheels and frame. This could partly be due to more aggressive geometry than my previous bikes, but in retrospect I think my tires were a bit over-inflated. The Empire comes with 28-mm tires, and I've previously ridden on 25s which I habitually fill to 100 psi. I did decide to fill these to just 90, but checking out this tire pressure calculator, it looks like even that was too high. For my weight plus the bike, I should have been at 73 psi in the front and 80 in the rear. (I should add, by the way, that this bike weighs in at 20 pounds including my lights, computer, and cages. Not bad for a size-large frame!)
The next new feature to familiarize myself with was the shifters. The SRAM system has just one button per lever. The right lever is for upshifting, taking you to a smaller cog in the rear. The left lever is for downshifting. To shift the front derailleur you press both buttons at once; since there are only two chainrings the derailleur simply upshifts or downshifts based on the current location of the chain (you can reconfigure the buttons using the phone app but this is the basic setup). Using the left shifter to move the rear derailleur is definitely going to take some getting used to, but the left-down and right-up is very intuitive. It also helped a LOT that I had added a "Current Gear" field to my Garmin 530 bike computer. I could easily glance down and see what gear I was in, front and back. No more peeking between the legs and not quite being able to tell whether I had one more gear left to tackle the huge hill in front of me. With 12 cogs on the rear cassette, it's not an easy visual perception task to tell precisely what gear you are in, but the "Current Gear" field makes it a snap.
I had chosen a hilly route, with grades up to 9 percent, so there was lots of opportunity to test the shifting, which, with now-fully-charged batteries, was smooth and instantaneous. The bike came with plenty of gears to handle the hills. The chainrings are 46 x 33, and the cassette ranges from 10 to 33 teeth (for you bike nerds, the configuration is as follows: 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 17, 19, 21, 24, 28, 33). I never felt the need to use the easiest 33-tooth cog, but I could tell it would have come in handy on some of my rides last summer where grades exceeded 17 percent. On the downhills I did use the highest gear a couple times but never felt like I was close to spinning out, even at 35 mph. I would say I could have easily continued to pedal and engage the drivetrain at 40+ mph. I could imagine a race setup where I would move to a 10 to 28 cassette, but honestly, at my level, it's probably not necessary. I'm considering buying a set of carbon wheels for a racing setup but if I did I think I would stick to the 10-33 cassette, or MAYBE a 10-30.
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| Look at all those gears! |
One initial disappointment with this bike is that while it is advertised as having fully internal cable routing, it doesn't quite ship that way. I was expecting the brake cables to run inside the handlebars and stem, then through the frame to the brakes. In fact, the cables were taped to the exterior of the bars, as with most bikes. They then route through an opening just under the stem into the steerer tube, and continue internally from there. It's just not quite as clean as I was hoping for. The bike is indeed set up for fully internal routing, but I guess they don't want to ship them that way because they need to remove the bars for shipping, and with internally-routed cables, there wouldn't be enough slack in the cabling to do that. That said, it's still a very clean look, and I don't think I'm going to go through the trouble of re-routing the cables right now. When I need to retape the bars in the future, then I might give internal routing a shot, but as you can see from these photos, the cabling is still very nice -- certainly the cleanest I've had on any bike to date.
The cables exit the fork and chainstay in a particularly elegant manner, very close to the brakes. I really appreciate this detail:
These detail shots also show off the finish of the frame nicely. It's almost a half-matte finish. You can really see the finish in the photo of the chainstay above, where there is a protective plastic tape under the chain with a shinier finish, which contrasts to the rest of the frame in the same photo. I like the frame color ("Lava Rock Red") a lot. Understated, but not boring!
As I rode on, I was able to appreciate how the bike handled on corners, on rough pavement, and at speed on hills. Other than the stiffness I mentioned above that should be partially addressed by reducing tire pressure, it responded well to every situation. I made a point of getting out of the saddle on a couple of the climbs. At first I felt like the brake levers might not shaped perfectly for riding out of the saddle, as the top of the lever protrudes at a bit of an awkward angle. But then I tried gripping around the base of the lever instead, and I got the response I was looking for. I think the top of the lever is better suited to riding in an aero position, with the forearms parallel to the ground. Then the lever-top provides the perfect angle for hanging on as comfortably as possible in that stressed position. I might tweak the angle of the handlebars just a bit in the future to dial in this grip, but I think it's definitely something I will get used to. I could ride very effectively out of the saddle either gripping the base of the levers or the drops, delivering instantaneous power to the drivetrain.
As you might expect for a brand-new high-end bike, it rides VERY quietly. It's almost silent when you are pedaling, with no rattles of any sort even on a rough road. When coasting, the freehub doesn't deliver quite the "buzz" that some riders admire, but that doesn't seem to affect performance. The drivetrain engages almost instantly when you shift. The only occasional bobble I noticed was when shifting from the large to the small chainring. I think this might be unavoidable in this configuration where the small ring is so dramatically smaller than the big ring.
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| That's a big gap between rings! |
But maybe it's simply a flaw in the SRAM system. I'd be interested to know if any readers notice a similar issue on their bikes. Otherwise the shifting was perfect. I certainly never experienced any chain rub, even when dramatically cross-chained.
Overall, I'm extremely happy with this bike. It's beautiful, it rides well, and it will work for me in a variety of contexts, from racing to bikepacking to possibly even some gravel riding. It's raining today or I'd probably be out riding it rather than writing this review! The first real test of the bike's capabilities will be on May 1, when I'm signed up to ride in the draft-legal sprint duathlon at the US national championship. Expect to hear more about the bike then (and probably between now and then as I ride it more and have more thoughts).
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