Marin Gestalt adventure road bike range – first look

Three new adventure models from the Californian manufacturer plus road and 'cross bikes

Published: July 8, 2015 at 3:30 pm

We got a first glance of Marin’s new Gestalt line at last week’s Eurobike media preview show thanks to Marin’s UK distributor Paligap.

So first things first, Gestalt doesn’t sound very Marin County does it? Aaron Abrams from Marin bikes explained the reasoning behind the Germanic moniker: “The Gestalt is named after a famous bar in Marin County that’s a meeting place for local riders. Aside from having 40-plus hooks to hang bikes they have 25 taps of the best micro-brewery craft ales. So it’s where everyone meets post-ride, be it mountain bikers, roadies or whoever. So we named our new bike after it. That and Gestalt is the German word for form, and this bike’s a new form of road bike.”

The Gestalt range consists of three models. The base model Gestalt 1 comes equipped with Shimano Sora, combining a standard compact chainset and wide cassette. At £800 the bike shares the same road bike-derived geometry as the rest of the range. It combines a 72.5 head angle with a fork featuring a 48mm offset and 415mm chainstays. Aaron told us that means the Gestalt handles with much more snap like a road bike should rather than the more relaxed nature of a road bike derived from a CX chassis. All of the frames come with huge tyre clearances (they ship with 30c tyres) and mounts for a rear rack, and guards front and rear. We’d expect to see plenty of Gestalts put into service as a commuting machine or a very capable adventure-touring bike.

The base model gestalt 3 gravel machine comes with a shimano sora drivetrain, and cable disc brakes for £800:

Marin’s £800 Gestalt 1

The Gestalt 2 at £1,000 gets a 1x drivetrain. Cleverly to keep costs down Marin hasn’t gone down the route of SRAM’s new 1x road specific group. Instead it’s combined a SRAM Apex shifter with a mountain bike SRAM X7 rear mech.

The gestalt 2 also has a 1x drivetrain using a mix of a sram apex shifter and a x7 rear mech from the mountain bike group:

Marin’s £1,000 Gestalt 2

The range-topping Gestalt 3 at £1,750 gets a few interesting additions. Aside from the new Rival 1 group running a 42t chainring paired with an XD drive 10-42 rear cassette, it comes with front-end upgrades from a new US-based component company Naild (www.naild.it – nailed it. Gettit?). This consists of the new carbon Nav-it fork, which is designed to work with the oh-so-clever Loc-It thru-axle system and the huge cooling fin disc mount (Ice-It). The Loc-it axles have a unique locking quick release system called 12-3-9, so-called because to lock you insert the lever in at the 12 o’clock position, turn to 3, then flip the lever over to 9 to close it and it locks itself in place. It’s a neat, fast and intuitive system that can also be found on Marin’s new top-end CX bikes.