Yep, here (bellow) are the new Rocky Mountain Vertex carbon and Altitude carbon. Many of you, if there are many, will have seen the likes of Marie-Hélène Prémont and Max Plaxton racing the new Vertex carbon with great success in races recently. Not many details but it’s light at around 19lbs, the white is about 100g heavier due to the large amount of paint on the carbon, there will be several carbon models, Rocky’s R&D did a lot of work on it although clearly slipped up by adding down tube cable routing which anyone on Mtbr knows I hate. Cable routing on the Altitude carbon is much better, it’s even got partially internal routing on the front mech which I really like. The Altitude does however look slightly ungainly, subtlety is something Rocky is clearly struggling with, see
previous post for more info and
photos.
Giant on the other hand has by no means given up on carbon as they have a very light new XTC SL which Oli Beckingsale and Adam Craig will be racing in the Olympics later this month but they don’t have many FS carbon models and certainly nothing that’s been updated in a few years so hopefully there will be a Trance X and Anthem X carbon for 2010 to go with the Reign X and Glory models due for an update by then. I would have posted lots of nice pics from the Giant 2009 launch at Crankworx a few weeks back but I couldn’t find any so we’ll make do with this one pic and the news that Giant is updating it’s websites very soon or now for Australian readers.
2 comments:
Yeah, they went all out with the frame, then what's with the downtube routing?
I think there is some copycatting going on, the Altitude has a very close rear suspension design to Horst link and the frame looks like a Giant Trance. Parts of the new Vertex look like a Marin I’ve seen mixed with the GF Superfly and someone who I strongly suspect works for Rocky said “it works for Specialized” as his best argument about why there was DT cable routing on the new Vertex, well I’ve had DT routing on my Specialized and it’s an absolute nightmare. I’ll have to ride them to see if I can find any other similarities because most of Rocky’s bikes are pretty original…
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