Old timers will remember Sunn for its winning race team fronted by Nico Vouilloz and Anne-Caroline Chausson, but the Sunn One e-bike is bang up to date and looks ready to shred.
It’s been a while since I’ve come across a Sunn bike, but maybe I should have been looking harder, because the latest e-bike from the French brand looks seriously heavy-hitting, with 170/160mm of travel and the latest Bosch CX motor. If you’re unfamiliar with Sunn, it rose to fame during the mid-90s as a World Cup Downhill race team, co-sponsored by Chipie jeans. With Cedric Gracia and Anne-Caroline Chausson at the helm, the team dominated DH and 4X. Anne-Caro, like Sunn itself, came from BMX, and absolutely cleaned up in downhill, winning her first Junior World Championship in 1993, then a further two junior titles and nine senior rainbow jerseys as well as an Olympic Gold medal in BMX. Oh, and four World Championships in Dual Slalom and 4X. It was a phenomenal career, that will be hard to eclipse.
The Sunn Radical downhill bike from 1994. Note the bolt-through axle, pull-shock linkage, custom chain device, and GripShift X-Ray unit.
Sunn-Chipie’s race bikes were ahead of the pack too, with the Radical downhill bike with Bos suspension being leagues ahead of the competition. The Radical+ in 1998 having head angle and chainstays length adjustment, different seat masts, tuneable high and low-speed damping, and much, much more. It’ll come as no surprise that Max Commencal was in charge at Sunn through much of the golden years.
The Sunn One Factory e-bike is the top of the range model.
But I digress. Enough of the history lesson, let’s take a look at the here and now. Sunn’s hottest new model is the One, an e-bike designed to take you ‘even further’. Built around a carbon frame, the One boasts 160mm of travel with a 170mm fork, it’s the longest travel bike we could find with the new Bosch Performance CX motor. The frame looks sleek yet purposeful, with the weight sitting visually low through the down tube and motor area, while the top tube and upper seat tube look slim with lots of standover clearance. A cutout in the down tube accesses the removable battery, in this case the new 800Wh unit – range won’t be a problem!
Removable 800Wh battery makes life easy, but the headset-routed cables make life harder.
This powers the latest Bosch Performance CX motor with a smaller, lighter casing and updated sensor tech to make it even more responsive than ever. Sunn seems to have clocked the motor slightly to help bring the battery lower and closer to the centre of the bike to help the handling. It still pumps out 600W and 85Nm, less than the DJI Avinox in the Amflow PL Carbon e-bike, but I’ve ridden the new motor and found the lack of rattle and improved response extremely impressive. Sunn has added the System controller in the top tube and the new compact Purion 400 display behind the bars to give access to settings and detailed data.
Rotating the motor helps Sunn tuck the battery closer, and keeps the mass centred.
There are three bikes in the range, the One S1, One Finest, and One Factory, with prices starting from €6,599 for the S1 and rising to €9,499 for the One Factory. Three sizes are available – S, M, L – and all use MX wheels, so 29in up front and 27.5in at the back. The small gets a 440mm reach, the medium 466mm and the large 490mm, chainstays are 445mm, the head angle is 64º and there’s a 77º effective seat angle. Seat tubes are pretty short at 380mm, 420mm, and 460mm. Claimed weight for the One Factory is 24.2kg.
The entry-level Sunn One S1 model comes in at €6,599.
Sadly Sunn is not available in the UK currently, so you’ll have to travel to mainland Europe to get your hands on one.