NEW BIKES
Latest iteration of the FlareMAX heavily leans towards rapid down-country tear-ups
£4,949 • 29in • cotic.co.uk
NEED TO KNOW
● Latest version of the FlareMax 29er trail bike
● DropLink suspension delivers 125mm travel, where frame geometry is designed around a 130mm fork
● Cotic combines a UK-made Reynolds 853 front end, with Taiwan-made steel seatstays and alloy chainstays for a best-of-both-worlds ride experience
● More size options and switches to C-Sizing: C1 to C5
● Bikes available worldwide, with free shipping to UK and Europe
● Available as a frame with shock for £2,099
● UK made frames are Datatag’d from the factory
Cotic’s charismatic steel-framed FlareMAX is back for round five, and it’s embracing the downcountry theme it stumbled across back in 2018.
First a bit of background though. Born five years ago as the 29in version of the 27.5in Flare, the 5th generation FlareMAX still rolls on big wheels. The frame tubing is mostly a custom ‘Ovalform’ version of Reynolds’ premium 853 air hardening steel too, so it doesn’t look radically different from earlier iterations.
Dig a little deeper however and it’s clear that the design has continually evolved. Yes, the signature ‘DropLink’ suspension still yields 125mm of rear wheel travel, just like on the 3rd Gen bike, but the kinematics have changed, inspired by Cotic’s mid-travel Jeht bike, and introduced on the previous FlareMax.
And it was for the Gen 4 bike that Cotic officially included lightweight 120mm RockShox SID forks on the options list, alongside 130-140mm trail forks, after lockdown ‘down-country’ experiments created a surprising amount of sales and rave reviews.
The main structural changes to the Gen 5 bike then are to increase strength. Cotic founder Cy Turner told me that this was to add insurance for increasingly aggressive riders who are sending it as hard on short travel bikes as they are on Cotic’s 140mm-travel Jeht, and on the longer-travel Jeht and Rocket models.
As a result, the new FlareMAX gets the same alloy chainstay assembly, dropouts, smoother finished linkages and shock mount as those bigger hitting bikes. The down tube itself also changes to a plain gauge Reynolds 853 tube rather than being butted, so it’s not thicker at the ends. Happily this adds significant strength without increasing weight, so it’s still got a noticeable gram advantage over the Jeht. There’s a new short triangulation tube between down tube and seat tube in front of the BB too, which noticeably stiffens and strengthens the power delivery and corner pushing capacity of the FlareMAX.
It’s been a while since Cotic’s Longshot geometry, with its stretched reach, short stem and relaxed angles, seemed really radical, probably because all of the other brands have caugh
