Santa Cruz Solo

Last week, Santa Cruz Bicycles relaunched its Juliana range of women’s specific bikes. You can see that here: www.julianabicycles.com but that’s not all. It is launching three further bikes in June – which we’ll no doubt reveal here. The first bike, announced over the weekend (yeah, thanks Santa Cruz…) is the Solo.

At the 2012 Fort William race, we chatted to Rob Roskopp, the Santa Cruz bigwig, who was buzzing after having just spent the best part of a cloudless week touring Torridon in the company of Andy at go-where.co.uk and riding fantastic natural trails for hours and hours. That experience obviously rubbed off on Mr Roskopp, who only ever used to have eyes for a nicely turned out race machine. The company’s new bike is certainly built with more of a ride all day trail-bike slant.

The new bike, the Santa Cruz Solo, in brief, is a 125mm trail bike with 27.5in wheels, available in aluminium or carbon. Santa Cruz is pitching it as ‘get out there and explore’ bike and it comes complete with a promo video featuring a bothy-sleeping, fire-lighting Steve Peat up in the wilds of Scotland.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So, here’s the bike – or the bikes.

The Solo will come in S, M, L and XL sizes. The medium carbon frame is a hair over 5lbs. There are two bottle bosses, though Santa Cruz don’t seem to be pitching this as an XC race bike. It’s a trail bike. A little less hairy than the 150mm Bronson, although there are still ISCG mounts for a chain device and 142mm dropouts for stiffness (not that QR carbon Santa Cruz bikes are flimsy…)

Chipps is off up to a secret location in Scotland on Monday night to get the in-person reveal on the bike and hopefully ride some of that kind of Scottish scenery that seemed to inspire Santa Cruz. We’ll have UK prices shortly too.

 

 

 

 

More photos in the gallery below:

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