Cross Country Bikes – the fastest mountain bikes in the world
Cross Country Bikes – the fastest mountain bikes in the world
Light, fast, sexy! Cross country (XC) bikes are the purest of all mountain bikes. And that’s exactly why these race bikes are surrounded by a magical aura.
Anyone who has ever ridden a cross country bike with less than 10 kilos total weight has a problem. Because the absolutely light-footed feeling when pedaling can be addictive! And that is precisely the charm of cross country bikes. With purist 100 millimeters of suspension travel, the sporty seating position and lightweight carbon frames, they are fully stacked for propulsion. You can not beat the speed on the road, on gravel or on easy trails than that of a XC race bike. But the mercilessly trimmed to propulsion concept of cross country bikes also has its pitfalls. The sporty frame geometry with low handlebars and high saddle, low-profile tires and the low suspension travel requires extremely good riding technique as soon as you go off-road. The pros in the Cross Country World Cup, with their stylish driving maneuvers in the downhill, sort of distort the reality somewhat. Because, as a normal biker, you don’t take jumps with such bikes and usually take the chicken line on steep descents. The extremely narrow range of application of cross country bikes has ultimately led to the fact that downcountry bikes are becoming increasingly popular. The “tuned race bikes” are simply more fun downhill. A complete buyer´s guide for downcountry bikes can be found here.
Features of cross country bikes:
100 millimeters of suspension travel at the fork
low total weight
frame mostly made of carbon
good rolling 29er tires
What you should look for when buying a cross country bike
If you want to buy a cross country bike despite its weakness in the downhill, you should above all consider the following points.
29er wheels only make sense in the cross country area of use. Through the better rolling behavior of the large wheels, the puristic suspension travel of 100 millimeters is compensated.
starting from 2000 €, cross country bikes should have a carbon frame.
good rolling tires and a low total weight are essential for riding enjoyment in this category.
in racing, a high-quality shifter circuit with at least 500% bandwidth is necessary to always have the right gear ready.
the chassis should be lockable from the handlebars.
If these points are met, you can assume that it is a good cross country bike. Point three, of course, raises another question. How much does a good cross country bike weigh? In order to better estimate the weight of cross country bikes, we have prepared a weight table for you. The weight table is based on data we collected after analyzing the entire market.
And yet there is still one crucial question to be answered.
Do I need a cross country fully or a hardtail?
In no other mountain bike category does this question arise as dominantly as in this one. From a technical standpoint, everything shouts: fully. Racefullys are more efficient, more comfortable and offer more safety when riding than hardtails. However, they are also more expensive and heavier. Good racefullys can actually be bought from a price of 3000 € and above. Below this price limit, we advise to get a hardtail. With good riding technique, you are not necessarily slower down the hill than with a fully. Many bikers also like the purist feel of hardtails, which is why you can partly ask the question of principle here. A detailed article about the advantages and disadvantages of Racefullys compared to Cross Country hardtails are here for you to read.
The price regulates the offer of cross country bikes
The question of whether you should buy a Racefully or a Racehardtail unfortunately depends significantly on your willingness to spend big or not. As described above, we advise in the under 3000 € price range to get a hardtail. Because here you can already find excellent carbon hardtails with high-quality equipment. Current 1×12 drive trains are already standard. Sometimes good suspension forks from Fox or Rock Shox are installed. Even in the affordable price range, the weight can be below 11 kilos in hardtails. Cross Country Fullys in or around 3000 € are usually still too heavy to really meet the intended use. So you can say: For 2000 € you can already get very good carbon hardtails. A really good Racefully costs 4000 € and more. A detailed article on the question of how much a good mountain bike should cost can be found here.
Our innovative approach to mountain bike testing allows us to provide you with a complete market overview. Only bike-test.com provides non-biased information on all available bikes on the market.
Under these quicklinks you will find the best cross country bikes in the different price ranges:
The best cross country bikes under 3000 €
The direct mailer Radon and Orbea have extremely good bikes in the price range up to € 3000. As a rule, there are already carbon frames here. 1×12 gears are definitely standard.
In this price range, you have the choice between fully and hardtail. Because argumentatively, both systems can be justified in this range. While the hardtails already have carbon rims and electronic gears, the fullys still have to make concessions in terms of equipment.
Between 4500 and 6000 € will fall with most bikers a decision right Fully. Because in this price range there are for the first time also extremely well equipped Fullys. Especially the Racefullys of Cube, Giant and Orbea convince in a holistic view.
The luxury begins. For under €8000, there are already bikes with an electronic gearshift and electronically controlled chassis. There is hardly any more reason for criticism in this price range. For the first time, high-end manufacturers like Santa Cruz and Trek are also coming around the corner with attractive offers.
You can no longer speak of reason here. This is the noblest material, which is also moved in the Cross Country World Cup. It does not get any better than this!
CONCLUSION on the subject of CROSS COUNTRY BIKE TEST 2023.
“Cross country bikes are the purest of all mountain bikes. With low weight and a sporty riding position, you can really rack up the miles on these things. At least as long as the terrain is not extremely rough. Because in steep descents or jumps, these bikes reach their limit pretty quick. But, with these wheels you are well equipped for a cross country race or at a MTB marathon. The carbon frame is almost standard in this bike category. The question of whether to buy a fully or a hardtail usually gets settled by the price tag. Under 3000 €, there are hardly any reasonable cross country fullys, but already very good carbon hardtails.”
... has spent more than 100,000 kilometers in the saddle of over 1000 different mountain bikes. The essence of many hours on the trail: Mountain bikes are awesome when they match your personal preferences! With this realization, he founded bike-test.com to assist cyclists in finding their very own dream bike.
We use cookies and similar technologies on our website and process your personal data (e.g. IP address), for example, to personalize content and ads, to integrate media from third-party providers or to analyze traffic on our website. Data processing may also happen as a result of cookies being set. We share this data with third parties that we name in the privacy settings.
The data processing may take place with your consent or on the basis of a legitimate interest, which you can object to in the privacy settings. You have the right not to consent and to change or revoke your consent at a later time. For more information on the use of your data, please visit our privacy policy.
You are under 16 years old? Then you cannot consent to optional services. Ask your parents or legal guardians to agree to these services with you.
Essential services are required for the basic functionality of the website. They only contain technically necessary services. These services cannot be objected to. • Hide service information
Purpose: Real Cookie Banner asks website visitors for consent to set cookies and process personal data. For this purpose, a UUID (pseudonymous identification of the user) is assigned to each website visitor, which is valid until the cookie expires to store the consent. Cookies are used to test whether cookies can be set, to store reference to documented consent, to store which services from which service groups the visitor has consented to, and, if consent is obtained under the Transparency & Consent Framework (TCF), to store consent in TCF partners, purposes, special purposes, features and special features. As part of the obligation to disclose according to GDPR, the collected consent is fully documented. This includes, in addition to the services and service groups to which the visitor has consented, and if consent is obtained according to the TCF standard, to which TCF partners, purposes and features the visitor has consented, all cookie banner settings at the time of consent as well as the technical circumstances (e.g. size of the displayed area at the time of consent) and the user interactions (e.g. clicking on buttons) that led to consent. Consent is collected once per language.
Use on legal basis of:Compliance with a legal obligation
Purpose:WPML ist ein Mehrsprachen-System für WordPress Websites. Die Cookies speichern die Sprache des Nutzers und können den Nutzer
auf die Version der Webseite umleiten, die der Sprache des Browsers des Nutzers entspricht.
Use on legal basis of: Legitimate interest
Purpose:WooCommerce is an e-commerce shop system that allows you to buy products on this website. Cookies are used to collect items in a shopping cart, to store the shopping cart of the user in the database of the website, to store recently viewed products to show them again and to allow users to dismiss notices in the online shop.
Use on legal basis of:Legitimate interest
Purpose:Elementor is a software used to create the layout of this website. Cookies are used to store the number of page views and active sessions of the user. The collected data is not used for analysis purposes, but only to ensure that, for example, hidden elements are not displayed again during multiple active sessions.
Use on legal basis of: Legitimate interest
Functional services are necessary to provide features beyond the essential functionality such as prettier fonts, video playback or interactive web 2.0 features. Content from e.g. video platforms and social media platforms are blocked by default, and can be consented to. If the service is agreed to, this content is loaded automatically without further manual consent.• Hide service information
Purpose: YouTube allows embedding content posted on youtube.com directly into websites. The cookies are used to collect visited websites and detailed statistics about the user behaviour. This data can be linked to the data of users registered on youtube.com and google.com or localized versions of these services. Consent
Purpose: WordPress as a content management system offers the possibility to write comments under blog posts and similar content. The cookie stores the name, e-mail address and website of a commentator to display it again if the commentator wants to write another comment on this website.
Use on legal basis of: Consent
Purpose:Google Maps displays maps on the website as iframe or via JavaScript directly embedded as part of the website. No cookies in the technical sense are set on the client of the user, but technical and personal data such as the IP address will be transmitted from the client to the server of the service provider to make the use of the service possible.
Use on legal basis of:Consent
Purpose:Google Fonts is a service that downloads fonts that are not installed on the client device of the user and embeds them into the website. No cookies in the technical sense are set on the client of the user, but technical and personal data such as the IP address will be transmitted from the client to the server of the service provider to make the use of the service possible.
Use on legal basis of:Consent
Statistics services are needed to collect pseudonymous data about the visitors of the website. The data enables us to understand visitors better and to optimize the website. • Hide service information
Purpose: Google Analytics is a service for creating detailed statistics of user behavior on the website. The cookies are used to differentiate users, store campaign related information for and from the user and to link data from multiple page views.Use on legal basis of: Consent
Purpose: Google Analytics is a service for creating detailed statistics of user behavior on the website. The cookies are used to differentiate users, throttle the request rate, link the client ID to the AMP client ID of the user, store campaign related information for and from the user and to link data from multiple page views.Use on legal basis of: Consent
Purpose: Matomo is a service to create detailed statistics about the user behavior on the website. Cookies are used to differentiate users and to link data from multiple page views.Use on legal basis of: Consent
Marketing services are used by us and third parties to track the behaviour of individual visitors (across multiple pages), analyse the data collected and, for example, display personalized advertisements. These services enable us to track visitors across multiple websites.• Show service information
Purpose: Ad Inserter allows us to manage and target advertising based on the content of the website. Cookies are used to detect adblockers, to count the number of page views with an adblocker and to remember whether the user has already been redirected to a subpage that prompts him to switch off his adblocker. In addition, a cookie can be used to remember how often which advertising placement has already been displayed and how often the respective advertisement has been clicked on.Use on legal basis of: Consent
Purpose: Ad Inserter allows us to manage and target advertising based on the content of the website. Cookies are used to detect adblockers, to count the number of page views with an adblocker and to remember whether the user has already been redirected to a subpage that prompts him to switch off his adblocker. In addition, a cookie can be used to remember how often which advertising placement has already been displayed and how often the respective advertisement has been clicked on.Use on legal basis of: Consent
Purpose: Google AdSense allows websites to place ads from the Google Ads advertising network on their website and be paid for it. Cookies are used to distinguish users and track their behavior on the website in detail and to associate this data with advertising data from the Google Ads advertising network. The data will be evaluated for the targeted placement of ads and to measure the success of the advertising. This data may be linked to data about users who have signed in to their Google accounts on google.com or a localised version of Google.Use on legal basis of:Consent