Wilier are well known for their road bikes, the Italian company has a historic 106-years of making bikes for skinny tires, but they will be introducing their first 29er bikes to the MTB market this year.
Wilier has been building mountain bikes for a while but they haven’t been brought to to many market areas outside of Italy. That changes with the Wilier 101 XN 29er bikes, however. When the big 29er concept came to be Wilier jumped on board taking all the knowledge they experienced with building high-end carbon road frames and started working on this twenty niner project. The 101 XN 29er is designed around an 80mm fork with an aggressive racing geometry. The carbon frame uses most of the technology found on the high-end carbon Wilier road bikes, with the 101 XN 29er bikes using the same 60-ton carbon fiber as the recently release Cento 1 SR.
The carbon frame includes some intuitive design features, one of those being the internal cable routing, which dives the twenty niner a clean modern aesthetic. There is a plate on the downtube that is removable to make it easier to feed the cables, and there’s a sweet cable guide below the bottom bracket. a great solution to help with bike maintenance.
Also the rear of the mountain bike has a replaceable rear hanger that is compatible with QR & Thru axles. Wilier also applied a plate inside the chainrings which they call Integrated Frame Protection and it operates as a chain device to keep your chain from coming off, to protect the spendy carbon frame. Skinny seatstays give a little bit of forgiveness on your lower back, while they used asymmetric chainstays to handle with the differentloads.
These Wilier 29er bikes will be offered in two kits. The first featured in our photos, is built with a Shimano XTR groupset, RockShox SID fork (which is different to the bike in these photos), Fulcrum Red Power XL wheels with Geax AKA tires, a Ritchey cockpit and seatpost, and a Selle San Marco Concor saddle. That’ll cost you £3,999.
The second kit is switched with a Shimano XT groupset, FSA Afterburner crankset and RockShox Reba RL fork to bring the cost down to £2,750. It is said there is an aluminum version of the frame, the Wilier 503 that is also in the works.
Purchase info is located here…
- Funner, 29erCafe
