Muddy Brown's Blog: Fresh Goods Sunday - Specialized Turbo Creo 2 Comp

If you have been a follower of my blog for a while you will know that I mainly ride electric bikes now and I bought my first Specialized Creo back in January 2020. I got on really well with the bike for the type of riding I do - distance, terrain wise etc so I treated it to some bling DT Swiss wheels, I was running a road and gravel set up and swapped the wheels over to suit. Then Bike Scene at Guisborough had a great deal on some sell off Creo's, next model up in the road version with Ultegra / XT Di2. I did the deal and had a Creo set up for gravel with 27.5"/650b wheels set and 700c wheels on the Creo set up for road so did not have to swap wheels over every time.

My original Creo has been without fault and nothing gone majorly wrong apart from a snapped seat post collar which is a common fault. The motor / battery etc all need software updating but the bike still runs sweat as a nut!

My second Creo not so lucky, it had an intermittent fault on the motor / electrics which was resolved by Bike Scene with updates to motor, battery, system and did a re calibration. Then the bike lost all power, Evans Cycles thought it was the wiring loom so replaced it to discover it was not the wiring but the motor. They replaced the motor and all has been well since. The Di2 battery failed so that had to be replaced and the bike has had all it updates done again inc the Di2 system.

As I have mentioned before the Creo on my 27.5" wheelset is the most comfortable, enjoyable bike I think I have ever owned and had it set up where the bike was perfect for me. As all my bikes, it gets washed, dried, lubricated and charged so its always ready for the next ride out.

So the new Creo 2 was launched last year and I went to have a look at it in Infinity Cycles and Specialized Harrogate. To sum up the new model briefly the bike has had a redesign with new geometry, gravel / off road based, much larger clearance on the forks and rear end for bigger tyres on 700c/29" wheels. They have changed to standard hub spacing, new 1.2 motor - more power and quieter, same battery, upgraded / update on the head shock units. Groupset's are Sram AXS with 10-50t cassettes. There are three models, all gravel based and two colour choices on the lower and mid spec models. Pricing is about the same as the latest version of the Creo 1 and sizing has changed from S, M, L etc to 52, 54, 56cm.

I thought long and hard about buying the newer version as the 1.1 motor has enough power for what I want, the noise from the motor does not really bother me. There is just enough clearance for a 2" tyre on 650b wheels and the head shock unit works and I never turn it off (apart from my road model).

Down side to the Creo 2 was Madison / DT Swiss UK confirmed I could not convert the road boost spacing on my hubs on all three wheels sets back to standard. Specialized don't recommend you use 27.5"/650b wheels on the new model due to lowering the bb height. They also recommend the minimum tyre width on 700c is 38mm!

The other factor was Specialized normally reduced the new models around 3 - 6 months after launching in the UK so that was putting me off buying one at full rrp. Stock in the UK is low with not many coming into the country on the first batch. More are due on the second batch in Spring.

Bailfe Cycles had 10% off over the festive period on all new bikes inc the Creo. Then I noticed by accident that Infinity Cycles had an offer of 15% all new stock, this swung my decision.

The S Works is priced out of this world but the spec sheet is top draw. The middle model Expert is £7.5k with carbon wheels, adjustable head shock and mid range Sram groupset.

I opted for the lower model at £5k with alloy wheels, non adjustable head shock and lower range Sram AXS. The reason being was the price difference I could swap to carbon wheels and upgrade a few comments from my existing Creo gravel and still have money left over.

I did not need the adjustable head shock as I run the bike with it on all the time, the parts I was not going to swap were the same on the expert so opted for the Comp model.

I will do further blogs on the parts / components I have swapped / replaced and how the bike performs compared to the Creo 1 in future blogs.