Hardtails, Softails, soft-tail, What Is The Future Of XC Mountain Bikes?

Berria is unveiling the new Bravo, their XC-race hardtail, which now sports a unique soft-tail design.

The deformable rear fork is a product brought by carbon fiber materials. The combination of rigidity and certain elasticity can realize this design. When we talk about the deformable rear fork, the first thing that comes to mind must be the ISO Strut released by Trek in 2019. The Super caliber of the system, and then the new EPIC released by Lightning this year.

Let's take a look at the changes that XC models have undergone in mountain bike competition.

The original XC is also the most familiar model for our riders, which is the hard tail, because there are more demands for climbing and pedaling in mountain off-road, and the pedaling of the hard tail is the most efficient and the lightest in weight. Later, with the development, there are more and more soft tails, because the stroke is small, so the structural design can be varied.

Nino’s Scott Spark’s hidden shock is also a relatively new design, and then there is the deformation design of Trek and Lightning, which still has a shock and has a smaller deformation range.

If the design of Trek and Lightning is not true deformation, then Berria's new Bravo brings the answer.

Bravo is a hardtail structure, the chainstay and bottom bracket are traditionally connected, and the chainstay is also hard-connected to the seat tube. The seatstay-to-seat tube connection has an internal pivot point that provides rotation when the seatstays flex, and Berria calls this the SOFTEX suspension system.

In order to achieve the expected deformation effect, the rear triangle has been specially designed.

The deformation design has actually appeared very early. We know that Scott reproduced its classic deformation hardtail bike at this year's Euroshow, but its rear fork is fully hard-wired.

Berria said that the new Bravo has advantages over pure hard tails and soft tails when dealing with small impacts, and it is also quite heavy. The weight of a single frame is 1150g.

The current XC field is almost dominated by soft tails. Will the future deformation structure or the design of Trek Lightning lead the trend?

And now the itinerary seems to be getting bigger and bigger.