Oranges are the only fruit (in the show anyway)
Press Launch

Oranges are the only fruit (in the show anyway)

September 3, 2010

Orange has been very busy this year. While most of the bikes appear unchanged, there’s a load going on under the surface. And apart from this Yorkshire based citrus brand, we’ve not really seen a great deal of real oranges here…

First off there’s the P7. Now all beefed up for the CEN standard (despite the fact that they never appear to fail in real life) the frame gained some gussets last year. It’s still a popular model and here is shown in the custom pink and ”Turd’ brown paint job.

If you have an in-house powdercoat facility, you might as well abuse it.

The P7 has gained sliding dropouts and all that stuff in the last few years, but some folks wanted a simpler bike. Here's the P7 'Pure' with regular vertical dropouts and 'not-Reynolds' tubing. The bike complete will be £999

The new Orange Crush gains a tapered head tube and the complete bike price comes in at a very reasonable £1399.

Crush gets a flared head tube too. £1399 or so.

The Orange guys were very excited about the new Orange Elite: It’s a race or all day or ’10 hour race’  bike. It has a tapered headtube and is designed for 100mm forks. It’s one of the lighted Orange bikes ever made. In ‘Pro’ spec  (XT/Hope/Fox/Avid) it comes in at £1899. There’ll also be a frame-only option. We’re keen to get one in on test.

It's a bike for the new style of XC/big day racer. 15mm forks and flared headtube on a very light chassis.

Who said XC riders didn't like stiffness?

There’s a new Orange ST4 too. As the Five has become a little more burly (with its slacker, flared headtube ways and its optional Maxle back end) so the ST4 has resolutely stayed ‘XC all day/bumbling around’ focused. For 2011 the linkage changes to a swing link aimed at reducing flex. Rear travel is ‘110mm-ish’ for an intended 120mm fork. It remains the bike that 50% of Five buyers should really get instead as it’s a perfectly capable trail bike with a lighter feel.

New ST4, new stiffer link.
ST4 Diva. Comes in a 15.5in size only.

The Alpine 160 gets a few tweaks to keep it current, including a flared headtube (that houses a Cane Creek Angleset  – allowing for a couple of degrees’ head angle tweaking) and a new, larger 31.6 seattube ready for droppy seatposts.

Cane Creek Angleset appears on many of Orange's bigger bikes.

Chipps Chippendale

Singletrackworld's Editor At Large

With 23 years as Editor of Singletrack World Magazine, Chipps is the longest-running mountain bike magazine editor in the world. He started in the bike trade in 1990 and became a full time mountain bike journalist at the start of 1994. Over the last 30 years as a bike writer and photographer, he has seen mountain bike culture flourish, strengthen and diversify and bike technology go from rigid steel frames to fully suspended carbon fibre (and sometimes back to rigid steel as well.)

More posts from Chipps

22 thoughts on “Oranges are the only fruit (in the show anyway)”

  1. What is it that makes white bikes look so good? went on the orange web site and the frame only never came up as having colour options like the Five frame does.

  2. The Five was the perfect UK bike until they slackened the head angle in 2009. I never understood why since the Alpine had that option covered. The pre 2009 bike is great on singletrack and climbs very well as well as being brilliant downhill. It also feels willing and eager to tackle anything and never feels like it’s ‘too much bike’. The current version is dull in comparison, unresponsive through tight singletrack and the front wanders on steep climbs. Orange have just copied the other European bike manufacturers who mostly changed to slacker head angles. This makes sense for lift assisted downhill biking found in Europe but it’s not ideal for the UK.

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