5 BIKES YOU’VE PROBABLY NEVER HEARD OF

Global supply chains may be struggling but there are plenty of smaller brands striving to get their products onto the trails. Here are five upstarts with new models in the works

shorter-travel model, with 140mm, while the MT gets 160mm. To keep costs down, the two frames are identical, but switching the lower link plate and shock alters the travel. Eminent’s complex AFS suspension system is utilised, where the rear axle ‘floats’ between two pivots and the shock is compressed at both ends. That’s not all; the main pivot is well above the chainring and employs an idler to help control chain growth as the suspension compresses. According to Eminent, the 15mm of rearward axle path (through 80% of the travel) helps the Haste eliminate “hang up” and just “reset and move onto more chunk” with every bump. There’s a lot going on out back, but the full carbon front end is just as in your face, with

REICHMANN SENDURO

It might sound like a send-up, but Reichmann even one-ups the six-bar Yeti 160E with its seven-pivot enduro bike. Designed by Mattias Reichmann, the elaborate Senduro takes complexity to another level in order to deliver ‘unparalleled kinematics’. It’s not an easy bike to get your head around, even when you watch the suspension animation on the website, but in essence it’s a virtual pivot system with the multiple links being used to manipulate the leverage curve (and therefore the progression) rather than the axle path.

Is all that extra material and complexity worth it? We won’t know until we try it, but certainly other elements of the bike’s design – namely the geometry and travel – point to a bike that blurs the line between DH and enduro. For example, the head angle is 62.5°, there are adjustable chainstay lengths, a low 435mm seat tube, nearly 200mm of travel and the possibility to run a 250mm eye-to-eye shock. The Senduro is still a prototype, but Mattias aims to have production versions on sale by the summer. emrg.bike