The Ergon GA1 is a great halfway house between regular grips and the fully flared Ergon GX2s, offering a grip with slight palm swell and gentle flares at both ends to fill out your hands the way nature would have intended it.
We like the GX2 grips for cross-country epics where the flare spreads hand loads better, but we’ve never felt happy running them on technical trails where we couldn’t get the hand wrap we felt we needed for optimum control – precisely the conditions in which these 131g left- and right-handed GA1s excel.
They attach to the bars via a single 4mm Allen bolt on an alloy ring clamp, which is positioned outboard – just one bolt, but refreshingly no slippage in three months of riding. We felt much of the same levels of comfort afforded by the Ergon GX2s but with the hand wrap and control we needed for riding technical trails.
The main part of the grip is hardwearing rubber with softer rubber in the hatched grip zones. We’ve ridden the GA1s extensively both with and without gloves and they offer a predictable tacky feel in the wet or dry. We’re converts to the Ergon philosophy.