FEATURE
84 mbr M AY 2 019
the development of Cotic’s bikes. “The level of riding
informs the bikes,” he says. “I’m a much better rider
than I was 10 years ago when I moved here.”
Fast friends require a bike that helps you keep
up, or even get ahead and stay ahead. A better rider
needs a better bike.
The Soul is still a staple of the Cotic range,
but the bike Cy rides now is the Rocket Max. A
150mm-travel full-suspension 29er, it shares little in
common with that original Soul other than a family
resemblance thanks to the slender steel tubing.
Cotic designs its bikes with fi ve attributes in
mind: fun, durability, clean lines, interactivity and
the ability to inspire confi dence. Cotic’s Longshot
geometry aims to enhance the last two attributes.
Longshot is the culmination of a process that
started back in 2015 and is now employed on all
of Cotic’s mountain bike frames. After a long chat
with Chris Porter at Mojo, and a ride on Chris’s own
Geometron, Cy became intrigued by the new-school
geometry concept of a longer wheelbase, lower
bottom bracket and slacker head angle.
Cy is a qualifi ed Chartered Mechanical
Engineer — fashion and fads glance off him and
he’s unimpressed by hype. He also admits tohaving a contrarian streak; if he’s told he should
like something he generally takes a dislike to it. At
the same time he’s not one to dismiss ideas out of
hand, and would rather spend time doing his own
research and testing to come to his own conclusions.
Rather than fully jumping on the limousine
bandwagon, Cy had a 27.5in Rocket prototype built
up with extreme geometry to see if the idea had
merit. “It was a real lightbulb moment. I remember
riding it and saying, ‘Wow, this is so much better!’”
After a few months of riding the prototype, Cy
was sold on the concept, but one thing that stumped
him, and continues to, was the fact that he managed
to nail the geometry of the 27.5in bike straight
away. When the 27.5in Rocket was signed off for
production in April 2016, it used geometry that was
almost identical to that of the prototype.
Things weren’t quite so simple when it came
to designing the 29in version, the Rocket Max.
“The immediate application of length to the bike just
didn’t feel right, and it took another 18 months to get
the bike to work.” Cy puts this down to the fact that
the fi rst iteration of the bike was too conservative. It
wasn’t until he started going to extremes that things
clicked into place. “The slacker I made it, the betterMaverick Cy’s a
blue sky thinker