Giant launch new Reign with medium sized wheels

If you look at other MTB related websites this little post will no doubt be old news (the embargo lifted yesterday). Here at Spoke though, we didn’t quite make the cut for the limited invite Reign launch in Canada’s backcountry, so we’ve had to wait until we could get our hands on a bit of info regarding the new range of Reigns before we could bring you the lowdown. The deal is the Reign, which has been pretty much ignored by Giant over the last few years, has been given a new lease on life, thanks mainly to medium sized wheels. But the 2015 Reign is not just a bike with larger wheels; from the ground up, it’s a new bike, and on paper (or screen) it looks bad ass.

There are two models with carbon front triangles, The Reign Advanced pictured above is the mack daddy of the two and features a full SRAM build. An XX1 drivetrain kicks things off, Pike forks and a Debonair equipped Monarch Plus look after the suspension side of things, SRAM Guide’s look after braking and, in an interesting move, Giant’s own 100mm height adjustable seatpost is replaced with a 125mm travel RockShox Reverb. The other big news is Giant’s Over Drive 2 proprietary headset standard has been shown the door in favour of a standard and versatile tapered headset.

Numbers wise the new Reign is a 160mm travel affair, and it sports a slack 65 degree head angle, although the custom 46mm fork offset goes some way to make sure low speed riding isn’t compromised. Make no mistake, the new Reign knows what it is, and that is a super aggressive trail bike, on which you can go toe to toe with the best on the world’s toughest Enduro courses (or just fine in Nelson, New Zealand). 435mm rear chainstays and a low BB round out the bike’s modern and aggressive numbers. The frame weighs in at 2260grams without a rear shock and the weight of the bike as pictured (the top blue one) in large is a very respectable 12.8kg (28.2 pounds).

We’ll be heading to Rotorua next week to check out the Reign models in the flesh. Unfortunately they won’t be rideable, but we’ve put our hand up for a test bike and will hopefully be able to bring you ride impressions sooner rather than later!