Swedish bike customiser Dangerholm has worked his magic to create this new Scott Scale RC Aero. It's his latest work on Scott’s XC MTB range to adapt it to gravel riding, and this time he's added a dose of aerodynamics into the mix.
Dangerholm says the aero concept isn’t aimed at being faster than a standard gravel race bike on smooth gravel, but to maintain performance on rougher surfaces, where a gravel bike with 40mm tyres would start to struggle.
Previous Dangerholm customisations have included December 2025’s Scott Spark HMX Gravel Project, a full-suspension gravel bike with 110mm travel, a custom one-piece cockpit and 52mm-wide, 70mm-deep aero rims.
Then there’s the Scott Scale RC SL, a drop-bar bike with a host of custom carbon from Darimo, a RockShox suspension fork and a 7.19kg claimed weight.
At the heart of the Dangerholm Scott Scale RC Aero's design is Scott’s Scale Gravel RC, a rigid-fork, flat-bar variant of its Scale XC mountain bike. Dangerholm usually rides a size L, but sized down to an M to accommodate the drop bar and make the reach shorter.
Dangerholm has raided Scott’s road bike parts bin, swapping to a seatpost from a crashed Scott Foil RC aero road bike and the seat cluster to fit it.
This involved cutting up a box-fresh Scale frame and hoping the section of the Foil RC frame would fit, which it did, wrapped with plenty of carbon fibre to hold it in place.
More cut-and-wrap was done on the Scale’s driveside chainstay, enabling Dangerholm to fit a larger 46-tooth chainring to the concept bike, followed by a lot of sanding down to smooth out the frame surface.
The fork leg mounting points were also removed to up the aero.
Bling bits
Once the frame and fork were painted, it was time to bolt on lots of fancy aero parts, starting with that aero seatpost from the Foil RC with its built-in light, topped with a 99g Berk Lupina Monocoque saddle.
As with Dangerholm’s Scott Scale RC SL, there’s a cockpit from Spanish super-light component maker Darimo. It’s a custom Nexum Drag Gravel with a shorter 80mm length and 380mm width to suit the Scale frame’s longer reach. The slacker head tube angle of the Scale frame required a unique -12-degree stem angle.
There’s also a set of custom headset hardware to fit the bar to the frame.
Further fancy hardware comes in the form of a SRAM Red XPLR AXS rear derailleur with CeramicSpeed OSPW X Alpha jockey wheels, along with a Red XPLR 13-speed 10-46t cassette and Red chain.
That’s paired with a Wert StW-M titanium crankset with hollow crank arms and a 314g weight. The one-off axle sits in CeramicSpeed Alpha bearings and is a little wider than usual, adding 3.5mm to the offset and enabling Dangerholm to fit a 44t Red Aero chainring with a power meter.
Finally, there are Xpedo M-Force 8 Ti pedals.
Dangerholm has used the Red brake levers. But rather than the standard Red calipers, which are flat mount, he’s switched to two-piston 612-Parts post-mount aero calipers, along with lightweight Italian Carbon-Ti X-Rotor Aero brake rotors.
The wheels haven't been ignored, with prototype 45mm internal-width, 70mm-deep wave-profile rims developed with a pair of Canadian firms, and designed for aerodynamics and tyre stability with 2.25in MTB tyres.
They’re built onto Extralite HyperSmart 3 hubs with Alpina Hyperlite spokes. The hubs have a Boost adaptor kit and can be specced with a SRAM XDR freehub to fit the SRAM road-spaced cassette.
Dangerholm reckons that, despite the wide tyre stance potentially positioning the shoulder knobs poorly for cornering, it’s rare to lean into a corner enough for this to have an impact when riding on gravel, because you’d wash out first.
He admits the 2.25in Maxxis Aspen ST MaxxSpeed Team Spec MTB tyres probably aren’t going to add much to the bike's aerodynamics. He’s running TPU inner tubes and has blacked out the logos for cleaner aesthetics.
Dangerholm isn't the only rider to adapt an MTB for gravel use. Chris Mehlman rode a Pivot LES SL with a drop bar at Unbound XL in 2025. It’s not only customisers who are blurring the boundary between gravel and mountain bikes either. Last year, we highlighted four brands with gravel bikes with clearance for MTB tyres.
We’ve recently seen Ridley launch the Ignite GTX with 2.3in/58mm tyre clearance, while Pinarello’s Grevil MX, as with Dangerholm’s concept, adds an aero road bar to a frame with 50mm tyre clearance and a 100mm-travel suspension fork.
