OPEN RANGE
YETI SB130 | $8,200 X01 RACE TURQ
THE SB130 IS LIKE A CHEETAH. IT’S FAST AND IT’LL BITE YOUR HEAD OFF IF YOU’RE NOT CAREFUL.
The SB130 is long. It also has travel. Therefore, it’s a long-travel bike. It’s a long-travel bike in spite of its rather diminutive actual amount of rear-wheel travel, of—you guessed it because it’s in the name—130 millimeters.
Truth be told, we started out riding this versatile new 29er on our short-travel course, which was sort of a mistake. Actually, we prefer to call it a learning experience. Thanks to its proprietary Switch Infinity suspension, the bike is remarkably efficient. There’s no doubt that it was one of the fastest and most fun bikes around the short-travel loop. If it were considered a short-travel bike, it’d be right near the top of the litter.
But this cheetah needed more range to really open things up. So, we went over to the long-travel course—where it belongs because it has 150 millimeters of fork travel and a 65.5-degree headtube angle, duh—and it was right at home there, too. There aren’t a lot of bikes that can behave so well on punchy technical ups and downs, and then mob through steep, chundery, drawn-out descents with the same ferocity.
So how do we categorize the SB130? Is it short travel because of its rear-wheel travel, or is it long travel based on the fork? Maybe it’s both. It’s a short-travel bike with a long-travel fork, that climbs like a little bike but descends like a big one. That sure simplifies it, huh? Perhaps we’ll just call it mid-travel. Or mid-travel-shred. Best thing to do when you find yourself in a classic categorization conundrum is to shut up and go ride.
And when we do that, we learn that the SB130 has a considerably long reach—460 millimeters for the medium and 480 for the large. Those represented large and XL reach numbers a very short time ago. Correction, we didn’t learn those numbers by riding it—that happened when long. Wicked long. Not just because it is, but also because there’s a slack 65.5-degree head angle with a reduced-offset fork attached to it. Slack headtubes make steering slower and increase high-speed stability. So does increasing trail, which is what short-offset forks do.
