Polish based Kross bikes has made some pretty major advances in their mountain bike line-up over the past few years, and it looks like that trend is continuing. A big part of that has been their investment in World Cup level XCO racing with the Kross Racing Team, that currently boasts riders Yolanda Neff & Maja Włoszczowska. We featured Maja’s Level B+ carbon race hardtail last summer before she rode it to a silver medal, and now it seems that Kross has a new 100mm full-suspension bike that the UCI leading women’s team will add to their quiver. The new bike is still in a prototype stage, but after testing four different versions in aluminum, geometry is set & final tweaks are being made. We got a first look at the 3D printed prototype. And even more promising the carbon bike looks slated for production entirely in Europe while keeping the high value pricing Kross is known for…
Kross Earth 100mm carbon XC race mountain bike prototype
So the details on the bike are still pretty tentative. In reality, Kross’s product development team had planned to keep the prototype bike under wraps for a bit longer, but the company was just too excited to not let us share the news.
So the new Earth is an all-new full carbon 29er cross-country race bike, developed from the ground up by the same design team that build the fast& light Level B+.
From a suspension perspective the carbon Earth gets a single pivot design that relies on a bit of flex in the seatstays and uses a short (most likely machined alloy?) rocker link to drive a vertically oriented trunnion-mount metric shock, with a lock-out.
The bike will get Boost spacing and it actually will be compatible with either 1x or double chainring builds. Using a removable high mount for the front derailleur, the Earth can get a double setup of a single ring combined with a chainguide.
Out back the new Earth will use a flat mount rear brake on the chainstay, in a design that came directly from the pro team’s input. That setup can mean that they can run some really low-profile lightweight rear brake calipers with small 140mm rotors, or stick with a standard caliper & 160mm rotor with a simple adapter.
At the front the tapered headtube with carbon bearing seats will get a look familiar to it connection with the Level B+.
Besides the fact that the new bike is news (Kross said it’s not much of a secret that the team needed a carbon full-suspension race bike), even bigger is that Kross will build the carbon bike in their own factory in Poland. The new factory is currently under construction, with thoughts that it will be churning out the first manufacturing test framesets early this autumn, with real production of the carbon Earth to be the first bikes off the new carbon manufacturing line when it hits full steam at the start of 2018. We’re interested to hear more about them producing premium carbon bikes in Europe, and Kross has promised to keep us updated with even more details as it develops.
