Interbike 2011: Rocky Mountain

Press Launch

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Rocky Mountain’s PR guy, Andreas Hestler was kind enough to show us through the new 2012 Rocky Mountain bike range, just before he jetted off to the Trans-Provence race, where he did pretty well…

First up is the Vertex 990. When designing a full suspension bike, there might be 20 different versions of the design going backwards and forwards as the engineers tweak everything to get it all right. With the Vertex hardtail, there was 100 different modifications done to get it right. What Rocky has come out with is a sub-kilo 29er carbon frame that claims to offer a lot of stiffness while still being compliant, and grippy enough for longer distance racing. Oh, and it looks great…

If it's not flared and internal these days, forget it.

 

A hardcore 29er racing frame that comes in at 997g

 

Super-slim rear stays give some, er, give.

 

Who said that XC racers don't want stiff and simple 142mm back ends?

Here’s a quick look at Rocky’s DH bike, the Flatline. Big and chunky, it’s been tweaked to be more of a full-on DH bike, rather than the halfway house of slopestyle/freeride AND downhill of the previous design.

A neat touch on the seat clamp there. Perhaps the Canadians really do understand the wet?

Now here’s the Element. It was redesigned last year and includes its ‘Smoothlink’ suspension platform, which is a true four bar system. Here is the 29er Element 950. There is a custom Rockshox Revelation fork with a 120/100mm quick switch for uphill/downhill, or ‘race’ and ‘relax’ modes.

95mm of travel puts it in the ’29er racer’ ball park. (Or should we say ‘football stadium’?) – there are three 29er models: the 970, 950 and 930.

 

Super neat sag-o-meter built into the pivot.

 

120mm fork or 100mm fork at the flip of a switch.

 

It's not all 29ers or swanky carbon either. the new Element range has 11 models in it, including far more affordable aluminium models and those three aluminium 29er models.

 

 

 

And if you like a little more in the rear, the Rocky Mountain Altitude offers 140mm of all-mountainness

Now the only slight hitch with these great looking bikes is that Rocky Mountain currently doesn’t have a UK distributor. Until recently it was brought in by Silverfish, but as of about Eurobike last month, Silverfish had stopped importing Rocky Mountain and had taken over the Yeti distributorship from Evolution Imports. Whether Rocky will pick up a new distributor or go dealer-direct, we can’t be sure, but we’ll let you know when we do. Either way, we can’t see this brand going away in a hurry. After all, they own the domain www.bikes.com!

 

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 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 (4)

    footflapsfootflaps October 4, 2011 at 2:47 pm

    Amazing, now just about anyone seems to get sub 1kg even with a 29er. Few years back only Scott had managed it for 26″. How low can it go?

    rocketdogrocketdog October 5, 2011 at 8:13 am

    bring back straight tubes!

    tOmtOm October 5, 2011 at 8:59 am

    Be good to see if the new importer can be more competitive on the price

    ziwiziwi October 6, 2011 at 1:17 pm

    Seem to be one of those brands that always ends up on sales at the end of the year – guess cause they are overpriced, I have bought a few of their hard tails over the years and never been disappointed…of course I am a sucker for a good paintjob.

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