Trek Bicycles recently developed within their company an internal brain trust that they are calling Apollo. This group they have appointed to the Apollo project includes Trek employees across a full range of fields in engineering, industrial design, graphics and others departments who all have been put on task to re-invent bike design with minimal restraints applied to following existing conventions or standards. This Apollo group recently overworked the Superfly SL models, the 100mm travel 29er full-suspension bike and the hardtail model with the goal of building lightest ever Trek race mountain bikes. Their end result was an impressive weight reduction. Trek’s new Superfly SL hardtail frame now has one of the lowest 29er hardtail weights at an extremely impressive 896 grams. That is 1/2 pound, or 254 grams lighter than the current ’12 model. The Apollo groups results for the full-suspension SL 100mm now barely registers on the scale as well at just 1,850 grams or 4.1 pounds, 513 grams or just shy of 1 pound less than the 2012 29er SL full-suspension model. See more in the newly released Trek Bicycles Video below, and an article on the the new 2013  Superfly SL below the video, enjoy!

SUPA..FLY……….

Similar to the Superfly 100 and as described above the Superfly SL 29er hardtail is definitely lighter for 2013, but they pulled this off with absolutely no reduction with frame stiffness. To the contrary, they have reported they were able to get the headtube area even stiffer than the 2012 model. Also because the Trek race group requested having a smoother ride while staying seated on rough trails, the 2013 Superfly SL frame has more compliancy than older models. To reduce this trail induced chatter, they designed what is called roll wrapped compliant seat tubes. This name was married to it because of a manufacturing process. It gets formed similar to a carbon bar and is then bonded into the rest of the main frame. The seatpost then doubles vertical compliance for the frame, and Trek says offers more give than the Cannondale Flash 29er or the Scott Scale 29ers. This redesigned SL model also has dropouts that can utilize thru-axle or regular quick release rear skewers. The last item on the 2013 update list is they changed the placement of the rear brake to a post-mount that places the caliper’s forward mounting bolt on the chainstay tube and the rear post mount on the seatstay tube. The 2013 Superfly SL 29er bikes will make its first debut at the Olympics, where it will get raced on with American Sam Schultz and Emily Batty the Canadian. Complete bike weighs  just under 19 pounds.