Salsa’s latest road line-up is now completely disc brake equipped. BikeRadar got up close and personal with the new bikes at the Eurobike trade show.
Colossal
Salsa’s all-new road machine, the Colossal, uses a new disc-specific frame design and an all-new double butted tubeset. Up front, a carbon Enve disc road fork comes complete with the frameset.
Salsa’s Mike Riemer explained that Enve had to be the first choice for Salsa’s carbon disc fork offerings, as they consider it to be the best available. But Salsa also had a hand in its development.
The Colossal frameset will arrive in stores before the year’s end. The price is likely to be £1,900 (to be confirmed) for the titanium frame and full carbon fork, plus fittings.
Enve's new road-specific disc fork on the Colossal
Warbird
The second of the new bikes is what Salsa describe as their ‘gravel’ racer. Unmetalled road sportives have started to take off in the Midwest USA. Because Salsa are Midwest-based, it makes perfect sense for them to want to create a bike for that scene. Hence the Warbird was born.
Over in the UK or continental Europe, the Warbird would be a great Classics option, rough stuff bike or bridleway blaster. It’s able to take huge 38c tyres while still being a relatively light machine.
The standard Warbird uses a multi-butted Scandium alloy frame, but a titanium version will be offered too.
The complete bike shown below should be priced at about £2,300. A frameset, including the Enve CX fork, will be priced at around £1,000.
The Warbird features a tapered headset
Vaya Traveller
The classic steel Vaya remains in the Salsa range and stays disc-specific for 2013. Pricing starts from £1,300 for a Sora-equipped complete bike, rising to £1,600 for the SRAM Apex model.
The big news for the Vaya, though, is the new stainless steel Traveller. The brushed frameset features down and top tube decouplers, effectively splitting the bike into two smaller parts.
The neatest feature is the inclusion of the Alternator dropouts from their mountain bike line. That means keeping vunerable derailleurs out of the way when travelling is simply a case of removing the whole dropout assembly via two hex bolts per side.
The Vaya Traveller features top and down tube decouplers, for easy packing
It also means you shouldn’t have to readjust your cables and settings when putting the bike back together.
The Vaya Traveller frameset is priced at US$2,000 / £1,650 and includes the Enve carbon fork.
