2020 Norco Factory XC Team bikes

2020 Norco Factory Team edition Revolver HT and FS100’s

It is still winter here in Ontario, but hopefully it won’t be long before things open up and we can hit the trails! I am absolutely beside myself with these new machines. It may be more solo-riding than racing this year, but will enjoy every minute on these bikes nonetheless.

March 2020

Last year, I rode the freshly overhauled full suspension Revolver – a huge step forward in it’s geometry, stiffness, and ride characteristics from the pre-2019 models. While the frame design remains the same this year, it’s all new bells and whistles for me moving to an electronic groupset (wireless!), RockShox suspension, and DTSwiss wheels. A link to the geometry sheet from Norco can be found here for both bikes: (Hardtail, Full Suspension). In summary, we’re looking at a cross country race bike with a 68.5 degree head tube angle for both hardtail and full suspension and 460mm reach for the medium I ride.

The recommendation is to run a shorter stem with the relatively long reach on a race bike, mine is setup with a 70mm stem and 720mm flatbars. The hardtail has a wheelbase of 1146mm and 1148mm for the FS. So they’re pretty long and slack by xc standards, especially if you opt in for more travel up front – which is a direct buy or upgrade option! As a team, we’re running the new 100mm SID SL Ultimate from Rockshox, which comes in a nimble 32 stanchion, forgoing the carbon crown to improve stiffness and dropping even more weight from it’s predecessor with an ultralight, precision tuned new damper. The new SID also comes in a 120mm 35 stanchion model, which sounds like more fun than I can probably handle.

This was a pretty off-the-cuff coles notes on the new bikes, mostly spewing numbers since I can’t ride trails here at home quite yet. I am hoping though, as the season goes on, to include some more notes and comments on how the bikes are running – if I am savvy enough to program my own wireless SRAM AXS components, and changes I make to my setup.