Since being acquired by Scott Sports, Syncros has grown the line exponentially. While they’re known for their mountain bike products, they did actually produce a few road stems and other products before Ritchey Logic bought the brand and made it more of their all-mountain/freeride/gravity offshoot.
Scott bought the brand and immediately set about making it a more robust line to use as a high end OEM line across their entire range of bikes. Which meant a heavy dose of road bike components.
The brand is using a fairly easy naming scheme for the product hierarchy – 1.0 represents the best, with lower numbers getting lighter and more expensive. For mountain bikes, the letters refer to the type of riding: XR (cross country), TR (trail), AM (all mountain), FR (freeride) and FL (Freakin’ Light), the latter being their top of the line lightweight offerings.
For road, FL remains Freakin’ Light, RL is Road Light and RR is Road Race. And then the saddles cross both disciplines and use a slightly different nomenclature based on fit and the type of performance you’re looking to get out of the saddle.
All that and more, including an overview of each component category, after the break…
WHEELS
For a year or so before the brand moved to Scott, Syncros was showing some pretty sick mountain bike wheelsets, using their own hubs and some pretty light carbon fiber rims. Some of the tech made its way to Ritchey’s carbon 29er wheels, but most of it appears to have been left behind. The new line is shown at the top of the post.
For mountain bike wheels, they have the top of the line XR1.0 carbon hoops (26″, 29er), the alloy XR1.5 (26″, 29er) and the alloy TR1.0 trail wheel (27″/650B). All three have a 12xx142 rear/15mm thru axle front set up standard, but can be switched all the way down to standard QR if you want. This was done because most of Scott’s bikes (all suspension models except some of the lowest price points) have this axle arrangement. All are tubeless ready, with rim widths ranging from 25mm (19.5mm internal) up to 25.5mm (20mm internal) depending on model, all with 20mm rim heights. Weights range from 1,365g per pair up to 1,605g.
“We have taken some of the best parts on the market and our engineers and product managers selected things that offer the best bang for the buck with regards to aerodynamics, dependability, performance and cost,” said Lars Johnson, Syncros’ marketing manager. “We carried over a handful of products from Ritchey’s era, but not really for wheels. Here, we really went our own way, leaning more towards the XC and trail segments.”
This meant DT Swiss hubs and spokes in some cases, which is also a Swiss brand, and building from there. They use a lot of the Star Ratchet internals, stainless steel bearings and their bladed spokes. They’ve used them in their own way, though, using direct pull spokes more frequently and hiding the nipples inside the deeper rims on the aero road wheels.
The other difference is a more streamlined version of DT’s RWS skewer for their road wheels.
With everyone making a big deal about aero these days, what’s Syncros’ differentiation?
“First, everyone thought you needed to be narrow. Then deep, then wide,” said Johnson. “But some of the wheels that came out over the past few years were hard to handle on the bike, so we went with something a little shallower than what you might see from others. This makes them easy to handle.”
HANDLEBARS
STEMS
HEADSETS
OTHER
