Eurobike 2013: Fizik’s Thar – a 29er-specific saddle.

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It sounds a little like an April fool, but Fizik is serious. It has deduced that 29er riders struggle to shift their weight forward enough to counteract the rear weight bias of a big wheeler and are running in-line posts with the saddle slammed forward on the rails. So, instead of making the world design steeper seat angles, Fizik has developed the Thar – a 29er-specific saddle.

 

Shorter nose, wider midsection. The Thar.
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Compared to something like the Tundra2, you can see that the saddle has a wider midsection. This is to encourage you to sit further forward on the body of the saddle. The saddle rails are 25mm longer and allow you to run the saddle further forward. In addition, that bobbed tail is so that the saddle doesn’t get buzzed by the rear tyre when you’re running a slammed dropper post. Finally, a splash of red ‘adds some colour to the all-black panorama’ of the saddle world. What do you reckon then?

Thar. It’s light, it’s neat and it’s only for 29ers.

And this is the 27.5in/650B saddle. No, we just made that up. It’s another Thar. We’ll get one in and see what we reckon. Wonder what happens if you run it on a 26in bike. Will it explode?

Keep the feel in your winkie. The new Versus X

In other news, Fizik has produced some saddles with extreme channels in them, for riders worried about numb winkies. There was a semi-channeled model last year, but this is taking it a step further.

And then… taking it a step further and all the way to the top of the staircase is the new Tritone saddle. It’s for triathletes and riders on time trial bikes and it eliminates the saddle nose completely for riders in extreme ‘arse up, head down’ riding positions. Thanks to the extended tail, it’s UCI legal too. What would Graeme Obree ride?

The Tritone. Get that head down and pedal!

 

 

 

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.)

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