ORANGE STAGE 6 EVO SE
With its redesigned 29er, Orange’s tasty traction now comes with added sharpness
Orange bikes are born for slop. That single-pivot swingarm has always generated stupid amounts of grip on anything off-camber and slidey, so I knew just where I had to take the new Stage 6 Evo SE, the latest 29er trail bike from the Halifax brand. Somewhere that stinks. But in a good way. Grimy trails duly found – not hard this winter – I proceeded to get the usual reward of tenacious grip and emerged spattered and smiling from the first descent. But there was something else going on too, something relatively new to me. The bike felt tighter and stiffer, with more zip when cranking it up. Orange has entered the modern age of the trail bike.
In truth, Orange entered this age in 2020 with the Stage Evo 29, a 120mmtravel bike that’s led directly into this new Stage 6 Evo here. That bike showed us the direction Orange wanted to go in with its Evo trail bikes, stripping away as much weight as possible, a little travel, and tightening up the suspension to really differentiate them from its big-hit and plusher enduro bikes like the Alpine. Making a 120mm-travel bike zippy and tight makes sense, and
Transition, Evil, YT and loads more brands have been hammering this point home with brilliant down-country bikes for a few years. But with 140mm travel, isn’t the Orange Evo approach just going to rob the bike of its plushness without giving enough of a reward in terms of low weight and speed?
Firstly, though, the details. The Stage moniker tells you the bike runs on 29in wheels, and the Evo treatment means travel is nipped back by 10mm from the old bike, to 140mm with a 150mm fork. The SE version comes with Öhlins suspension, or there’s a Team version with Formula coil shock and air fork for £1,200 less. Naturally there’s also a frame-only option for £2,600 with a Rockshox or Fox shock.
Orange might not have moved on much in the materials it uses or its suspension layout, but it’s become an expert in tweaking the tried-andtested design, now using Finite Element Analysis (FEA). The Stage 6 Evo gets a new asymmetric swingarm design where the non-driveside chainstay drops lower, while the wall thickness of each part of the frame now varies from 1.3 to 1.6mm. The upshot is a bike that’s stiffer vertically, but actually slightly more compliant laterally than the old design, Orange says. In really simple terms that means more grip when the bike is lent over, and better efficiency when you’re pedalling. The shock has moved too, it noses slightly further into the down tube, which makes the suspension a little more progressive.
And perhaps most importantly, the main pivot position has moved lower to reduce pedal kickback and make the bike more neutral feeling.
The elephant in the room is the price – at £6,400 you’d expect to see a motor on there somewhere, or perhaps a carbon frame or wheelset. Instead you get
£6,400 / 29in / orangebikes.com