Sea Otter: Bontrager and Cannondale

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So how do you get your front suspension mountain bike under 16lbs?

You start with a carbon Cannondale frame with carbon Lefty. Then you put a 2×10 SRAM XX cassette on it, but shift it via Dura Ace Di2 electronic road shifters and mechs… Quite bonkers

That's not far off the minimum legal weight for road bikes...
Etoile* handmade bicycles at Bespok...
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Alloy rotor, Formula R1 brakes
ESI grips and what's that button by the brake mount?
Deconstructed Shimano Dura Ace Di2 shifters...
SRAM XX and Shimano Dura Ace in unholy congress.
Let's ignore that the front mech'ss curve isn't very appropriate
Surely those chainrings need some holes drilling in them
The bike all up. Doesn't look that terrifying from here.

Bontrager components was mainly showing off its new tyres and road tyres, but they also had some tasty looking mountain bike shoes. Let’s hope they’re a little more comfortable than the last lot we tried.

it's great to see a women's specific shoe without pink or baby blue accents.
Simple, strappy Velcro shoes never go out of vogue
The Gary Fisher team (with Bontrager components) is rightfully proud of having two US champions, so they've made a shoe. Check out the new Bontrager B-dot logo
Bontrager is coming out with a new saddle range too, in different widths (and different again for women - in 134, 144 and 154mm)
The saddles come in R (top), RL (above) and RLX with hollow cromo to hollow Ti rails respectively.
Here's the top end RLX saddle with hollow Ti rails, coming in at 195g (and coming in 128, 138 and 148 widths)
Not really our domain, that's down to Road CC, but there are five new Bontrager road tyres, form the introduction R1 up to this R4 Tubeless (and the R4 tubed, which is 220tpi and weighs 175g). Or there's the R4 Aero at 22c wide and using a soft 62A compound at 165g.

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 22 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

More posts from Chipps

Comments (7)

    I’d love to ride that Cannondale. Just to see. Some of the bits on it don’t look too daft actually. The geek in me really wants to fit Di2 gears too.

    you can might be able to meld a 2 ring cage onto the di2 front derailleur – ive seen it done between xt and slx…
    the troy lee paint job is tasty too – looks like that sort of moto inspired paint job is coming back as well…

    That bike just looks amazing. I’d really, really, really like one!

    So After all that technical blah about not needing dents in saddles to make them comfortable, Bonty bring out dented saddles again… I used to think of Keith as being very principled – is this just like riser bars – has he accepted that the technically correct components just isn’t acceptable to the market?

    i suspect keith has little to do with most of the products: trek have to be influenced by the market, no?

    “Bontrager components was mainly showing off its new tyres and road tyres”
    So where are these (MTB?) tyres they were mainly showing off then?

    probably the XR range that are already available in some places, and jooly good they are as well!

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