PLAY HARDER
With playfulness and agility at its core, Santa Cruz have designed their new 5010 trail bike (which shares its frame with the women’s-specific Juliana Furtado) around smaller 650b wheels, reckoning them to simply be more fun than 29in hoops. They’ve also shifted the shock lower in the frame and it’s now driven by the lower link, bringing the bike in line (in terms of silhouette, at least) with the longer-travel Nomad, Tallboy, Bronson, Megatower and Hightower. Santa Cruz say this has allowed them to make the 130mm of rear wheel travel more progressive and easier to tune and set up. It also ensures the 5010 can work with either an air or a coil shock.
But the changes don’t end there, because the geometry of this latest, fourth-generation 5010 has been updated too. The bike has been lengthened (the large has a reach of 472mm, 15mm longer than the previous version) and also has a 0.8-degree slacker head angle (65.4 degrees) and steeper seat angle (76.8 degrees). The measurements above are all in the ‘low’ geometry setting; there’s also a ‘high’ setting with slightly steeper angles and a 4mm higher bottom bracket, accessed via a flip-chip in the rear shock mount. Most excitingly, Santa Cruz are altering the e ective chainstay length across the five frame sizes. This means bigger riders get longer swingarms, in a bid to create the best balance possible. The chainstay length grows from 423mm on the XS frame to 432mm on the XL.
As it stands, the 5010 and Furtado are only available in Santa Cruz/Juliana’s ‘C’ or pricier ‘CC’ carbon fibre and there’s no alloy option. The lowest-spec C R build costs £4,099, while the rather flashy CC X01 RSV option pictured above will set you back £7,599.
Sunshine and Stonehenge can only mean one thing – the summer solstice. Every year, tens of thousands of revellers, history buffs, spiritualists and tourists descend on the iconic megalithic monument in Wiltshire to celebrate the year’s longest day. Every year, that is, except for this one. Like everywhere else in the country (and much of the rest of the world), the West Country hit pause to tackle COVID-19 and, for the first time in generations, this June the ancient stones weren’t echoing with the beating of hundreds of drums and massed choruses of pagan chanting.
With lockdown restrictions beginning to ease, and local lad and regular MBUK snapper Russell Burton knowing that Salisbury Plain was still a haven of peace and quiet, he and our resident man of maps, Max Darkins, decided to embark on a particularly scenic Big Ride there (see p110). Unable to resist the lure of the ancient stone circle, they managed to bag this shot of an eerily empty Stonehenge, uncharacteristically free of both tourists and mystic types. Although, as Max remarked: “Russell, with his long, grey hair, does look a bit like a druid on a bike!”