The new Norco Range Carbon is longer, lower and slacker (no surprise there) and has had its A.R.T. suspension tweaked to offer more progression and less chain feedback.

In the UK, the Norco Range Carbon is only going to be available with 27.5 wheels. The 29er Range Carbon will not be imported by Norco’s UK distributors (Evans Cycles). Well, not this year anyway by the looks of it. If the demand is there then we may see the 29er version for 2018.

If you want a capable plastic 29er from Norco then you could always check out the 2017 Norco Sight Carbon.

No matter what country you live in, for 2017 there will be no new alloy Range. Not for 2017 anyways.

Moving on, let’s concentrate on what will be available in the UK.

The Norco Range Carbon is a 170mm front/160mm rear travel enduro bike. Compard to the 2016 Norco Range it’s 8-22mm longer (reach), 0.6° slacker head angle (65°), 2° steeper seat angle, 5mm lower BB and 20-34mm longer wheelbase.

As with most new Norcos, the sizing is part of their Gravity Tune; shorter rear centres on smaller frames, longer rear centres on bigger frames. Rider-height-specific sizing basically. Nice idea.

The A.R.T. suspension has been tweaked too. The rocker now lies a tad flatter (parallel to the ground) which changes the axle path (slightly less rearward) and ups the progression of the shock a bit.

The rear shocks are mostly all Metric and trunnion mounted – note the trunnion Fox shocks on the top end models. We’ve not seen those before.

“We looked at the way Enduro bikes are being used – yes, they’re pedalled to the top, but essentially in an Enduro event they go through four or five downhill races over a weekend. This is a bike that’s going to be ridden hard, and we wanted to make it as reliable and dependable as possible. So we took everything we learned from the Aurum, which is the strongest bike we’d ever made, and employed it on the new Range Carbon.” – Owen Pemberton, Senior Design Engineer.