CANYON SPECTRAL CF8 CLLCTV
Canyon’s new mullet Spectral is a cut-andshut job, but it’s no Frankenbike monster
£3,999 / 29/27.5in / canyon.com
With its new Spectral CF8 CLLCTV, Canyon joins the short but growing list of brands with a dedicated analogue mullet bike. It even throws the horns and rocks its locks by keeping the term mullet, rather than going for the safer and more boring MX label that most rival brands have adopted.
First thing to get out of the way is that, while the wheel size mash-up is new for 2022, the Spectral chassis was refreshed last year, so if you’re familiar with that bike, you’ll have a head start understanding the new CF8 CLLCTV. For those of you playing catch-up, I’ll summarise the updates. Front and centre were changes to the geometry and sizing, with a longer reach, slacker head angle and steeper seat angle. The kinematics were also revised to give more support and improved pedalling performance. Finally, time and effort was spent increasing stiffness across the carbon front and rear triangles to give riders more accuracy and confidence.
Scratch below the surface and Canyon also took learnings from its Sender DH bike to make servicing and maintenance less of a headache.
Replaceable captive nuts, steel pivot inserts, threaded BB shell, tube-in-tube internal cable routing, double-sealed bearings and a SRAM UDH mech hanger should mean you can spend more time partying than wrenching.
To create this bastard love-child Spectral, Canyon has mated the front end of the 29er with the rear end of the 27.5in frame. What that means is there are no quirky compromises made with BB heights or seat tube angles, and the principle difference between the mullet CF8 and the pedigree 29er is a 5mm shorter chainstay. What’s left is just as progressive as its 29er counterpart that we reviewed in the Trail Bike of the Year test. I measured the head angle, for example, at 63.4° in the slack setting. That’s enduro slack, and part of the reason Dimitri Tordo from the Canyon Factory Enduro Team chose to race the Spectral at certain rounds of the EWS. Elsewhere the numbers are healthy but not excessive: 77° effective seat angle, 336mm BB height, 1,258mm wheelbase, 477mm reach. Across the other sizes the reach runs from 435mm on the S, to 460mm on the M