You might have seen sneakily-published images of the new Shimano Saint freeride/DH group elsewhere, but these are the first officially-released shots. Bear in mind that actual ridable production versions of this stuff don’t, in most cases, actually exist – we’ve had a very brief trundle on prototype kit – but this is what it’ll look like. It’s not going to be available until October or November, so don’t hold your breath. And pricing is yet to be announced although we’d take a guess at a bit more than XT but not quite as much as XTR.

Here’s the single ring variant of the Saint crank. It uses the same Hollowtech II design as 2003 XTR. The big hollow axle is permanently attached to the drive-side crank, while the non-drive-side fits onto splines and is secured with double pinch bolts. You can see how big the crank arms are – Shimano say they’re 100% stronger than XTR cranks while still substantially lighter than typical three-piece chromoly numbers.

For the Shore guys and other fans of the ubertechnical, there’s a two ring plus bashguard model. Pretty tidy looking and should prove popular.

And for everyone else, a traditional triple setup. The arms themselves are the same on all three so you can chop and change between ring setups as the mood takes you. The bottom bracket uses outboard bearings à la XTR.

Moving aft, this is the faintly Akira-looking rear mech. It’s a beefy looking thing for sure. If you’re wondering what’s odd about it, it’s that it doesn’t attach (and pivot around) a derailleur hanger. Instead there’s an extra joint that attaches rigidly to the end of the rear hub axle and from which the derailleur swings. Generally in the event of a crash the impact will be taken on that rigid unit and be transferred directly into the end of the axle rather than hitting lower down and applying a bending load to the hanger. Shimano claim they haven’t managed to break one in testing, and who wouldn’t like an indestructible rear mech?

Here’s the rear hub, showing the axle peeping out – that’s where the mech attaches. No quick release – if you want to take the back wheel out you undo it from the other side. We expect to see frame designers taking advantage of the new derailleur mounting and hub design.

The front hub is Shimano’s first 20mm through-axle unit. To accomodate the bigger axle, the Center-Lock splined disc fitting has been enlarged. It’s conceptually the same as 2003 XTR, but bigger and hence incompatible. Front and rear hubs are suitably large.

Brake calipers are a sleek, one piece, two pot design clearly influenced by XTR. Interestingly they appear to be directly post-mount compatible, with extra brackets for ISO mounts. You can choose from 160 or 203mm rotors.

We like the look of the Saint group a lot. It’s not a complete set – you’ll need to use shifters, brake levers and front mechs from elsewhere in the Shimano line-up – but the bits that actually need to be different for heavier-duty applications have been attended to. There are a couple of things we’d like to see. The rear mech is low-normal (aka Rapid Rise) only, designed to work with the current XTR brake lever/shifter units. And we suspect some riders would like to see a 185mm rotor option.

Other than that the only obvious gap is rear hubs to fit some of the wider/larger axle back ends found in DH bikes, but there are so many different ones that you can’t blame Shimano for holding back there. We suspect that it won’t be too long before a new rear hub standard emerges for this sector of the market, much as all the different front through-axle designs settled down to the common 20mm usually found now.

We didn’t learn a lot from our brief spin on a prototype setup except that it works, shifting is as smooth as you’d expect and the brakes have plenty of bite. We’ll have to wait and see how it all behaves for real…