Hiding in plain sight, Moots brought an upcoming dropbar adventure mountain bike model, in addition to a concept wide-tire gravel race machine.
Josh Weinberg
Moots typically has a big spread at artisan bike shows like Made. The Colorado brand has a robust catalog, featuring ten models that are available in a variety of finishes and sizes. It often utilizes such bike shows to display exotic build options or intricate in-house anodizations, shining a spotlight on its craftsmanship and capabilities.
While the brand followed its normal program fairly closely this year, with some beautiful current models on display in the booth, it also had two unreleased models on hand, essentially hiding in plain sight. Brand representatives couldn’t tell me much about one in particular, as neither is fully developed and one might not ever be produced, but they did let me photograph each build.
Moots Gravel Race Concept
With the CRD (complete race design) division already in place for both the Route gravel group of bikes, and Vamoots road frames, I suspect this new bike with race geometry will likely fall into an existing bucket.
The concept build was set up with Vittoria Terreno 700 x 55c tires on wide Zipp 303 XPLR wheels, with a bit of room to spare. I assume that since this bike is essentially a prototype, Moots hasn’t yet secured its own custom carbon fork for the wide tires, hence the Enve Gravel In-Route fork.
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The fork also signifies that this bike features a (mostly) internally routed cockpit, which is a characteristic currently available only on the Routt CRD in the brand’s gravel category. Moots makes a custom CRD spacer, machined in-house, that enables the use of its classic titanium stems with modern internal headsets like the Chris King AeroSet.
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