[Closed] Longshot Cotic Flare

Check out Roverpig's Flaremax thread, incredibly useful and certainly helped me. I've not tried the new longshot Flare so can't comment - good luck!

Hopefully demoing one on Saturday - I'll report back 🙂

StuF - Awesome. Thanks man! I look forward to hearing your thoughts!

I'll check out Roverpigs thread in the meantime

Cheers guys!

these are just my thoughts, I rode 3 bikes back to back around the same test loop (my soul, a rocket and a flare)

I've also not really ridden any other FS bikes so some of the impression is just getting used to differences between FS and HT

Rocket - Steady on the ups, not quite as eager as the soul or the flare - but strava times similar to the flare, but I wasn't pushing hard. Along the flat it was fine, took me a while to get used to knowing when and where to peddle to avoid strikes, it might have been that I needed slightly more air in the shock or getting used to the bb height changing more as the suspension compresses. On the downs it flew really smooth and deceptively fast, I felt like I was taking it steady but was still ~10% quicker than the soul which isn't bad given I wasn't used to the bike or tyres.

Flare - felt quick on the up, much more like the soul. Seemed to pedal better than the rocket with less pedal strikes, but that might just be me getting more used to the full suss or the shock being set up differently. On the downs the flare wasn't as smooth as the rocket, but not much slower, or I was gaining confidence so pushing harder. I gave the flare a quick lift in the car park when I returned and it felt heavier than the soul, but I'd not noticed the extra weight when riding, I forgot to lift the rocket to see how much heavier that felt when picking it up.

Some of the diffs between flare and rocket could have been tyres, forks or suspension setup, 2.3 vs 2.5 and helm vs xfusion hlr.

Overall I'm torn between the bikes, the soul does 95% of what I want out of a bike. The flare I jumped on and it was great and I felt at home on it but I'm not sure it adds much over the soul. The rocket was very different and would need the most change in my riding style, it also scared me in so much as it had the potential to go loads quicker than I'm used to - this may or may not be a good thing.

Tried the Flare at the Spring party at the weekend. Largely it feels like a Cotic. If I'm being pedantic, it feels like a "Paul Cotic", rather than a "Cy Cotic".

Pedals really nicely. More linear suspension feel than a Rocket, so on "trail" stuff it doesn't feel markedly shorter travel. Handles pretty much like you'd expect.

The missus very much clicked with that and didn't with the Rocket she tried, so she's currently in the process of ordering one. As a mkV Soul owner, I'd go straight for the Rocket, as like StuF, I'd find the Flare too similar.

Jon - you didn't by any chance also try out the FlareMax did you?

It's hard to compare bikes when they have different tyres and suspension setup. That's not a criticism of Cotic. The bikes are meant for different things, so they should be set up appropriately. But I guess you could end up in a situation where all you could really say is that, all things being equal, the Flare is probably a bit more efficient going up and the Rocket is a bit faster going down and you probably knew that anyway 🙂

I think for what I want the rocket is probably beyond my skill level and the extra travel would be "wasted" so to speak.

So I am pretty sure the flare is the way to go for what I'd use it but I can't work out if I should go 29er or 650B - there don't seem to be any reviews online for the New Longshot 650B version of the flare (I guess its only a month or so old)

When you are spending that much money it's natural to worry about getting it "right". But let's be honest, there are no bad options here and most of the time we are obsessing about differences that really don't matter. It's no secret that I love the FlareMax, but I'll bet the Flare is great too. It will be better than the FlareMax in some ways (probably a touch more manoeuvrable), worse in others (maybe not quite as good flat out in a straight line) but much like the Flare vs Rocket argument the differences are subtle and probably less that the difference you'd get just by changing tyres. Just buy whichever one looks nicest to you and ride the crap out of it 🙂

If it helps I'd probably have gone for the Flare if it had been available at the time, just because I prefer the green colour, although the blue has grown on me and the 29er is probably the better option for the sort of all-day mile munching that I do.