Testing the Elite Suito Trainer - What's it Like to Live With?

Set up and ready to ride

First, want to say a big thank you to Spin Bicycle Shop for lending me this trainer to test. If you are in the market for a new trainer, they have a good selection at a variety of prices so stop in and check them out. 

Now to business. Let’s get the boring stuff out of the way.

What is it:

A direct drive smart trainer. Your bike mounts to the unit with no rear wheel required. I would say its main competitors are the Tacx Flux S and the Kinetic R1 which are both about $50.00 less and the Kickr Core which is $100.00 more.

What makes it stand out in this very competitive bunch:

I would have to say the biggest advantage to the Suito is how well it hit the “plug and play” target. Open the box, remove some protective wrap (basically plastic bags), extend the legs, find and insert the correct adaptor for your bike (QR and thru-axle are both included and simply slide into place), mount your bike and go. The caveat is this works as long as you have an 11-speed set up; the included cassette is an 11 speed Shimano 105 unit. If you want to run a different cassette a traditional chain whip and cassette tool are all you need to change it out. It even includes a riser block for your front wheel.

Complete packaging

On to the good stuff:

There are several reviews available on the inter-webs going over every detail and spec and comparing the Suito to every other trainer available. I’m not going to go that route; I read a bunch of them and here is a summary. Accuracy is very good, no better or worse than any other similarly priced trainer. It is very quiet. It can make the slope steeper than most people will want to climb and can handle more watts than anyone this side of a pro track sprinter is going to put to it. It has ERG and resistance modes, it works with all the online training programs (TrainerRoad, Zwift, RGT Cycling, etc.) and it has Bluetooth, ANT+, and provides speed, power and cadence with no need for additional sensors. In short, it does what you expect and need a direct drive trainer to do.

If I’m not getting into the nitty-gritty, why is this worth reading? I’m going to tell you about my experience with it and hopefully provide some insight as to what it is like to live and train with for those of us who have to have a day job to finance our cycling habits. One last thing to know, I had little to no knowledge about the Suito going into this test and I did not read anything about it until after I had completed a couple of rides, I wanted to go in with no bias or pre-conceived ideas.

So here is my experience:

I got the trainer home and was shocked by how simple it was to set up. As I said earlier, this really is “plug and play” and from opening the box to being ready to ride was no more than a few minutes. Every other trainer I’ve used has required some assembly. I did decide to make one change once I had it set up, and that was only because of a bad idea I had in the works. I swapped the 11x28 cassette for an 11x42. This may seem a bit excessive for a trainer, but in two days I was going to be making an e-Everest attempt with this trainer using my gravel bike which has a single 42t chainring. The extra gearing was going to be needed. The swap was as easy as it is on any regular wheelset and requires the same tools. I had no problems mounting up my SRAM cassette and my thru-axle gravel bike.

Swapping cassettes are setting up the thru axle

Once everything was set up I decided I should probably download the app. I wanted to make sure the firmware was up to date and I wanted to be able to calibrate it with the Elite app (at least for the first calibration).  The download and account creation was simple and went easily enough. Creating an account required what you’d expect: age, height, weight, metric or imperial, pizza or burger, country or rock, the normal stuff.

Time to ride.

I hopped on the trainer ready to go. I opened the app and searched and searched for how to calibrate it unit only to find a second app was required. I have no idea why the two couldn’t be combined, but they are not. So, I downloaded the second app (a minor inconvenience, but something to note if you are short on phone memory), signed in with my info from the first app and opened the calibration tool. Which told me not to calibrate the trainer yet. What? Elite recommends riding for about 10 minutes before completing a calibration test. I have no idea why and I haven’t been curious enough to search for a reason, but I obliged. I opened TrainerRoad on my computer which immediately found the trainer and linked up via Bluetooth. Simple and no fuss.

I started off with an easy spin. It took a little more effort than I expected to get the flywheel turning, with the wattage jumping right up to about 250 for maybe a pedal stroke before quickly settling down to the 135 TrainerRoad was calling for. I did notice a slight rubbing sound so I stopped to investigate. I looked everything over, turned my cranks both ways, and eventually determined it was coming from the flywheel/belt area. I figured I would ride for a few minutes and see what happened. If it continued, I would stop and take the trainer back, but I needn’t have worried. It stopped within a minute or two and never made another sound. After that the first things I noticed were how smooth the Suito rode and how quite it was. I could hear my chain  (which was clean and well lubed) over the resistance unit itself.

About 15 minutes into my ride I stopped to do a calibration test. Which was very simple. I paused my workout, turned my computer’s Bluetooth off and opened the app. The app again told me to be sure I’d ridden for at least 10 minutes before doing the test, I clicked “okay” and it had me spin up to 19 mph and told me to coast. 15-20 seconds later it said “calibration successful”. I closed the app, turned the computer Bluetooth back on and was back into my ride. I will say I felt no difference pre/post calibration so it must have come pretty well set up.

For my next test (and my final run before my Everest attempt) I set up RGT Cycling and rode Cap Formentor. Again, everything worked flawlessly. Connecting the trainer to the app was incredibly easy. The “real road” feel was good. One thing I did notice was how quickly the resistance would change when encountering an incline. At first I thought it was me just not paying attention but after a few times of gong from 0-1% to 6-8% it felt like I had hit the brakes and missed that bit of inertia carrying you a few extra feet like you get in the real world. Once I started to expect it, it wasn’t a big deal and I would just be sure to downshift before a climb, not once I started it.

Alright, time for the big test. An e-Everest. That’s right. Over 29k feet of climbing in one ride on one hill. What a ridiculous idea. I’ll skip all the boredom that came with 14 hours of trainer time, but I will say the Suito never missed a beat, never had a Bluetooth hiccup, and was sure to make me work for ever foot of elevation I “climbed”. I expected to encounter some small issue during the day, but I didn’t. I can't think of much higher praise than that.

Here is the Strava link if you care to see it: https://www.strava.com/activities/4460529678

This pic is just in here for bragging rights

After my e-Everest, I mounted up my road bike. This meant once again swapping the cassette, this time to a 10 speed Ultegra (yes I live in the dark ages) and swapping to a QR skewer (wow, how out of date am I?). There was some slight grooving on the freehub body, but only as much as I expect to see on any wheelset and changing the adapters was again slide out one, slide in another, super simple. I then completed a number of easy workouts to spin out my legs and work on recovering, most of which were on TrainerRoad. I would say the power tracked well with what was asked of it. At times the power reading jumped around a little quicker than I’ve seen on other trainers, but never more than a few watts and at the end of each interval my avg power was on target.

Super easy swap

Minimal marking, even after an e-Everest

Once my legs were feeling a bit better I decided I should have a little fun with the trainer and see what it could do. I picked an easy workout on TrainerRoad and after warming up I switch out of ERG mode and into resistance mode. I did this purely for fun and for some testing purposes, because let’s be real, if you are getting a direct drive smart trainer you are not going to use resistance mode for TR. What I did find is I could never really find a resistance percentage that felt right. There was either too much resistance and it would kill my cadence or not enough resistance and I would have to ride at way too high of a speed for the power (i.e. 26mph at 170 watts). 

There was a second reason I wanted to switch to resistance mode. I wanted to try a couple of sprints. I hate to say it, but with TR this just didn’t work all that well. On my first attempt I got just over 900 watts and it felt like the flywheel started going faster than I was pedaling and the power started to go down even as I shifted into a higher gear. So I increased the resistance level and went for it again. This time I got just over 1,000 watts and it felt like I hit the brakes. Third time, too little resistance again, fourth try was better and I got it to about 1,200 watts before it felt like I hit the brakes. I’m sure the correct resistance level was in there, but after four attempts I didn’t care to try and find it. And again, lets be real; there is no actual reason I was in resistance mode doing sprints on TrainerRoad, it’s not the place or platform for it. It was however fun to try and I wouldn’t mark the Suito’s performance down for it at all. In ERG mode it hit the targets and kept up with power changes for each interval.

Testing or playing, you decide

I did a few more workouts and the Suito performed well during all of them. I tried putting the power smoothing to anywhere from 1-5 seconds and the line was defiantly smoothed, but it didn’t effect performance in any way, it just looked a little nicer.

Time for another test. Back to RGT cycling. This time I did a three-hour fun ride on a mostly flat course (Borrego Springs). I did some testing of the drafting feature. RGT has bots that ride on all the courses and a number of different watts/KG. I jumped on with one that was riding at 3.5 watts/kg. I did a nice kick to jump on their wheel and as soon as I was close a little monitor popped up on screen telling me how many watts I was saving by drafting. It’s been a while since I’ve ridden in a paceline, but I would say it felt as realistic as a trainer can and I only had to ride at 3.0-3.1 watts/kg to stay on the wheel. If I’d stray off the back a little I could feel the resistance slowly ramp up, same if I accidentally passed them for a moment. The Suito responded quickly but never in a harsh way. I would say this is one area it really excelled. At the end of my ride I tried another sprint. I mean, if you are going to sprint on the trainer it’s going to be on something like this or Zwift where you are racing, so it better work well here. The bad news: with nearly 3 hours and over 63 miles in my legs I didn’t have the kick I wanted, but the good news is my ~1,000 watt sprint felt much more like a real sprint than it did using TrainerRoad (as it should).

So what is it like to live with?

Here is what I can say after over 32 hours, 526 miles and nearly 32,000 feet of climbing in the two weeks I was using the Elite Suito: It is an extremely competent trainer that worked well every time I used it. No hiccups, not glitches; just consistent, smooth riding. It stayed on the required power well enough, it changed resistance quickly at the start and end of each interval and it was very quiet. 

Are there some downsides? 

Sure. Due to the leg design, there is a tiny bit of wobble on center. Nothing worrying or even noticeable after 5 minutes of riding. The resistance can sometimes change faster than I expected (is this really bad?), it has two separate apps and for some, it doesn’t say “Kickr” on the side.

At the end of the day I would definitely recommend it to anyone looking for a direct drive trainer in the $800.00 price range. Some of the more expensive trainers may have a few more frills, but if you goal is to ride hard and not have to worry about your equipment, this is a solid choice. 

Once again, thanks to Spin Bicycle Shop for making this review possible. If you are in Old Town Lansing be sure to stop in.