Niner has just leaked these images of their new Air 9 Carbon, the first carbon fiber bike from the brand.  It’ll be debuting officially at Eurobike and Interbike in September.  According to Chris Sugai, Niner co-founder, target weight is sub-3 pounds and they plan on shipping them by end-of-year.
That big ol’ bottom bracket hole you see there…it looks like it could run a variety of bottom bracket systems.  There’s speculation out there that it’s set up to accommodate BB30, and we think it’s about the right size for Niner’s EBB Bio-Centric bottom bracket, which would make the frame versatile enough to run as a single-speed or geared racer.  That’s our guess…it’ll go both ways, hopefully we’ll find out for sure before Interbike…
Hit ‘more’ for a close-up photo…
The Air 9 Carbon has been in development for about 12 months.  Pricing has not been set yet.  You can’t see it from this side, but the driveside has an outlet just in front of the dropout, indicating the frame may run internal cable routing.  This is just speculation…it could be a drain hole, too, but there are no cable guides or bosses on this prototype that we can see.
Given that they can build up a 17.4 lb GEARED bike with their AIR 9, this should let them build up just about the lightest 29er mountain bike around…especially with the new SRAM XX group!
