I'm shocked. Saving $8749 on the original price, are we witnessing the biggest-ever Black Friday cycling discount on this Specialized gravel bike deal?

We've been seeing some cracking Black Friday bike deals this year, but this one has almost left me lost for words (well ones that I can print anyway).

While we know that the best gravel bikes can cost 'as much as a car' these days, how about saving enough money to buy the bike and still buy the car?

While the original $17,499 was an incomprehensible price for a bike, what is even more incredulous is that it currently has 50% off, saving $8749.99 on the price tag.

Specialized S-Works Diverge STR Gravel Bike: Was $17,499 now $8,749.99 at Specialized

This deal is wild, and still a lot of money, but there can't be many times you save this amount of cash unless you're buying a house.

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Specialized S-Work Diverge STR Gravel Bike: Was £12,000 now $8,999 at Sigma Sport

Unfortunately, the whopping 50% off the S-Works deal isn't available everywhere, despite hunting high and low for a UK option. I did however find this decent 25% saving on the bike at Sigma Sports.

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I don't suppose Specialized will have sold many at the original price, but this is a lot of bike.

We tested the very same Specialized S-Works Diverge STR at the launch event and found, other than price, it hard to fault.

Our North American Editor even priced out the S-Works model spec by spec, finding, MSRP prices being what they are, that if you were to buy the Diverge STR frameset and build it up yourself with the same components as offered in the S-Works model, you'd still spend around $13,100, and that was two years ago. At the time it was a hard-to-justify amount to spend on any bicycle, but by doing this bit of research it provided some perspective on how the price tag got to be so high.

At this crazy $8749.99 discount price it makes it much more palatable, and in fact, it's $250 cheaper than the latest Specialized Diverge STR Expert which runs Sram Rival rather than Red and loses all the lightweight S-Works features.

Better still, it's $2,250 cheaper than the Diverge STR Pro, which comes with Sram Force, and again lacks all the S-Works finishing kit.