MARIN NEWS & REVIEWS

Marin Trail Hardtails

Marin’s “trail hardtail” range is something of a rarity amongst mainstream manufacturers. The vast majority of hardtails on the market are still, deep down, XC race bikes. They might have 100mm travel forks, riser bars and big tyres but under the accoutrements they’re still “classic” XC bikes. Marin makes some of those too, but the trail hardtails are different, giving you a chuckable, long-forked package of the sort that’s generally the preserve of the niche manufacturer.There’s a four-bike range of these bikes, with the Rocky Ridge and Wildcat Trail sitting at top and second within it. We’ve been riding both of them and they’ve very similar (they share the same frame), so we’re doing a two-for-one bike test special…

More »

Marin Trail Hardtails

Marin’s “trail hardtail” range is something of a rarity amongst mainstream manufacturers. The vast majority of hardtails on the market are still, deep down, XC race bikes. They might have 100mm travel forks, riser bars and big tyres but under the accoutrements they’re still “classic” XC bikes. Marin makes some of those too, but the trail hardtails are different, giving you a chuckable, long-forked package of the sort that’s generally the preserve of the niche manufacturer.There’s a four-bike range of these bikes, with the Rocky Ridge and Wildcat Trail sitting at top and second within it. We’ve been riding both of them and they’ve very similar (they share the same frame), so we’re doing a two-for-one bike test special…

More »

Adjustable-travel fave gets a big performance boost.

When Marin designer Jon Whyte introduced his QUAD-Link FRS frames to the range after years of hard selling the virtues of single pivot designs, we wondered how the shift would be greeted. Thankfully for Marin, it was well received; so well in fact a number of Marin and Whyte models sold out long before the end of summer 04. For 05, the QUAD design has been extended across all but one of the full sussers in the range, leaving the Alpine Trail as the only single pivot Marin. As a result, the lastest Rock Springs has been upgraded with QUAD technology. More »