Sea Otter: Intense Tracer 27.5 and a what?

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We recently brought you news of the new Intense Carbine 27.5in bike, but this was our first chance to see it in the flesh and to chat to Jeff Steber, Intense’s lord of innovation.

It’s pretty when close-up too

 

Internal dropper routing. All internal paths are sleeved

 

What do you reckon on the colours? Shall we call it ‘speed ninja’?

 

Side-on. The Intense Tracer 27.5

 

That Rod Stewart’s let himself go

 

The Intense show home

 

The AD160 – Doddsmobile

Now Intense is proud that all of its alloy bikes are still made in Temecula, California. One of the advantages of that is that prototypes can be quickly made to try out different ideas. Jeff Steber had never tried, let alone built, a ‘Forward Geometry’ bike – akin to Mondraker’s well-known design that runs a long top tube with a zero extension stem. Don’t bash it until you’ve tried it, OK?

Now it just so happens that MBUK journalist, Andrew Dodd, was after a new bike and wanted to see if anyone could make his dream machine. We’ve already seen how Nicolai had made a machine for Mojo’s Chris Porter  with a super-long wheelbase. Doddy was after that kind of thing, so he asked Jeff at Intense, who was happy to oblige. With the tubes taken off the shelf and a couple of bits poached from existing assembles, Steber was able to weld up the frame in a day, leave it to heat treat overnight and Doddy was riding it the next day. This is the kind of thing that Intense is keen for the world to see – that sort of ‘Hmm, let’s try this approach’ that you can do when you can prototype in-house.

 

Now THAT is a raw finish

 

Still with neat touches like the rubber dropper orifice

 

Andrew Dodd 160 and a Jeff squiggle

 

What wheel size? That wheel size.
Even prototypes get a head badge and decals

 

And here’s the final thing. It’s very roughly based on a 160mm Tracer, but it’s long. Very long. It’s got a 26.25in top tube.

And it also has a 48in wheelbase. Go and measure your own bike and compare.

Doddy seems delighted about it and you’ll doubtless be able to read all about it in an upcoming MBUK. But in the meantime, here’s a sneak at his new machine.

 

Doddy’s a tall bloke, but this is another size up entirely

 

A zero-reach stem finishes up a pretty committing new test machine.

 

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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.)

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