MARTIN MAES: ORBEA RALLON

Orbea used the World Cup stage to launch its Orbea Optimization Lab, or OOLAB for short, piloted by Martin Maes. The Spanish brand tells us it’s a development “blue sky project”, a platform where its engineers and riders can come up with new ideas or tech that’s not necessarily tied into a product range yet. At Lourdes it was the turn of the Rallon to get more travel, although annoyingly Orbea wouldn’t confirm any details about the bike or Martin’s set-up. What it did say was this wasn’t a prototype DH bike and there are no plans to build up a race team in the category. “Rather, it’s an effort that advances our knowledge, which we’ll apply to our next ranges.”

If we’re being cynical about it all, we’d say EWS racer Martin Maes really wanted to ride the World Cup, and this is Orbea’s way of getting him there without a dedicated downhill bike. After all, he certainly has previous in this department, winning the Fort William round in 2015.

The machine he rode at Lourdes certainly looked the business: the stock bike has 160mm travel and a 170mm single-crown fork, but you can clearly see both of these were upspecced to something longer. Up front is a Fox 40 dual-crown fork, and the images suggest there’s a custom link fitted at the rear, perhaps growing the travel up to 180mm.