The Giant Propel Advanced Pro 1 is all about efficiency and that's apparent from the get-go. This is a bike you can muscle about without worrying that it's going to flex from your best efforts. There's little discernible movement at the bottom bracket when you're cranking out full power and the front end feels equally tight, even when you're sprinting out of the saddle or pushing it hard into a fast right-angled bend.
That's totally not the case here. For a start, the Propel's handling is nimble. Steering is quick, so navigating through a group of other riders or around defects in the road surface is a cinch. This coaxes you to attack fast and tight turns at speed, confident that the bike's reactions will see you right even if your judgement is a bit off.
Maybe the slim stays and seat tube play a part, maybe the fact that I have loads of seatpost extending out of the frame helps, but I never felt even remotely shaken up by this bike over two months of riding. You get a stack height of 562mm and a reach of 393mm, giving a stack/reach of 1.43. The riding position is aggressive, as you'd expect on an aero bike, but not crazily so. I played it safe with 20mm of spacers underneath the stem – it's always better to err on the side of caution rather than cutting a steerer too short and regretting it – but you could lower the front end easily enough.
Think of the stem profile as similar to that of a letter n. Structurally, that must be a challenge but the fact that there's no bottom section means it's easy to run the hoses in the gap. They then go down into the head tube, the necessary space provided by a D-section fork steerer . The Propel Advanced Pro is available in three flavours, all 12-speed and with hydraulic disc brakes. The Propel Advanced Pro 0 AXS gets SRAM's Force eTap AXS groupset, the Propel Advanced Pro 0 Di2 is a Shimano Ultegra Di2 build, and the Propel Advanced Pro 1 that I've been riding is equipped with SRAM Rival eTap.