The job description for a mountain bike seatpost is straightforward: long, strong, easy to adjust, and unlikely to rattle loose. Which makes it hard to understand why it's taken 20 years to come up with a simple post as good as the Fizik Cyrano.
Fizik are a saddle company, so it makes sense for them to design a seatpost too. They began with the tough bit, the head. This has to be very supportive and features a 46mm lower cradle, around 10mm longer than usual. This is because Fizik make carbon railed saddles, which like lots of level support for a long and happy life. The Cyrano cradle fits alloy and oversized carbon rails and grips equally well.
The other key attribute for a head is adjustability and the Cyrano is a joy to fit saddles to. The nature of the design means you don’t have to take it completely to pieces to fit or remove saddles, as with other post designs. When you have the saddle rails in the clamps at roughly the right fore and aft position, just do up the front-mounted threaded thumbwheel to set the tilt angle then nip up the rear 4mm Allen bolt to snug everything down. The result is a perfectly clamped, well protected set of saddle rails.
The alloy shaft is laser etched with height guide markings for easy, accurate refitting and comes in 27.2, 30.9 and 31.6mm diameters. We’ve had ours on the go in hardtails and full-suspension trail bikes for a year and, apart from admiring glances from other riders, we’ve had zero issues – though we’d like the 4mm Allen bolt to have a bit of a deeper head, for more secure adjustment with occasionally shonky Allen keys.
While we can highly recommend the Cyrano for mountain bike use, for road use it has two shortcomings. While its 232g weight (27.2 x 330mm) is reasonable for a tough off-road post, it's a fair bit heavier the latest lightweight road units. It also does little to cushion your ride. On the plus side, it does come with a rubber collar to mark your seatpost height that’ll also stop rain getting in your seat tube.