ORBEA RALLON M-TEAM
The sizing and geometry have changed but will the Rallon M-team make the A-team?
£6,999 / 29in / orbea.com
It’s October 2013, and I’m wandering around Finale Ligure, Italy in a daze. I can’t for the life of me remember why I was there. All I recall is Steve Jones from Dirt magazine asking me if I was attending the Orbea launch. I replied no, as mbr hadn’t been invited. I promptly became his plus one and the party got underway.
The reason for the end-of-season festivities? Everyone was gathered to celebrate the launch of the new Rallon R4, a 160mm-travel enduro bike with a revised suspension layout and 27.5in wheels. Well, it was almost 10 years ago. Two things really struck me about that bike. The first was how good the low BB height felt as it increased stability and confidence. The second was how effective the suspension was – the combination of the custom-tuned BOS Kirk shock, concentric rear axle pivot and longer shock link giving the bike unparalleled tracking and control. I left Finale impressed that this more traditional XC brand from the Basque country had produced such a formidable enduro race bike.
Fast forward to 2017 and Orbea launched the next round of revisions, updates that include the switch to 29in wheels, a side-arm frame design – similar to, but not a copy of a Specialized – and a much shorter swing link to actuate the shock. The low and lower BB heights remained, but the suspension feel had changed a lot on the Rallon
R5; the bike felt less planted and plush, with a greater emphasis on pedalling performance. Obviously I wasn’t the only one that noticed the difference, as Orbea then followed that up in 2019 with the Rally On linkage that boosted travel on the rear by 10mm to 160mm, and increased the progression rate from 8% to 20%.
So what’s new about the 2022 Rallon R6? The biggest differences are the updates that Orbea has made to the sizing and geometry. As such the BB height is a hair lower still, the reach numbers have grown on all four frame sizes and the seat tube heights have shrunk. In fact, Orbea has added 30mm to the reach on the size Large, which brings it pretty much inline with the XL Rallon R5 that I tested back in 2018. I’d like to think I was ahead of the curve, but Orbea was simply behind the times with its sizing. Not any more.
It has also increased the chainstay length on all four frame sizes from
435mm to 440mm to better balance weight distribution with the longer front ends. That’s right, Orbea now offers a size Small Rallon. Best of all, the latest Rallons all have relatively short seat tube lengths (435mm for the size Large), but the frame layout retains good seat post insertion depth: 350mm on the L, 330mm on size S and M. So there’s no issues running longer dropper posts.
I was somewhat confused then that our test bike came with a 150mmtravel Fox Transfer post. Given the amount of post above the seat collar I could comfortably have run a 200mm post. Orbea’s website states that the bike should have a 175mm post, which would be ideal for a really wide range of rider heights. The final tweak to the geometry is a 1.5° increase in the effective seat tube angle which, combined with the longer chainstays, improves the seated position for climbing. There’s also a dedicated shock extender link for running an Mx/mullet set-up. The link corrects the geometry for the smaller 27.5in rear wheel but forgoes the geometry-adjust feature.
Orbea has also added integrated down-tube storage that it’s dubbed Lockr, and there’s even a multi-tool that