After a troubled couple of years of ownership changes, production changes and reliability issues, Marzocchi looks like coming back with all guns blazing for 2010. This ‘ere is the first of the fresh new Marzocchi line to be revealed, the catchily-monikered 888 RC3 Evo WC.

While the new 888 looks superficially similar to the old one, this is pretty much a clean-sheet fork. Every bit of it has been redesigned in the pursuit of higher performance and lower weight. Inside, the bushings are now slotted to improve lubrication, and each fork has carefully-matched bushings, stanchions and lower legs. Each of those parts is subject to manufacturing tolerances, so by selecting ones that are closest to one another at assembly time you should get a smoother running, more reliable fork.

The coil spring is still titanium, but of a higher grade and with fewer coils – it’s half the weight of the 2008 spring. All of the bolts in the 888 are titanium too, while butted and machined stanchion tubes save a big pile of weight. The new open bath RC3 Evo damping cartridge is designed to be extensively fiddled with by the user, with an interchangeable compression shim stack for fine-tuning.

All of this has lopped a startling 600g off the existing 888, with the RC3 Evo WC coming in at 2,990g (6.6lb). That’s some way off the weight of RockShox’s benchmark Boxxer World Cup at 2,694g (5.9lb), but the Boxxer WC uses an air spring, which some would consider cheating. The coil-sprung Boxxer Team weighs just 10g less than the 2010 888 – it’s fair to say that Marzocchi have done a pretty good job with weight loss, an area for which the company hasn’t been particularly well known in the past.

The 2010 Marzocchi 888 is expected to be available in September 2009, with a retail price of (sit down now) £1,399.95. Find out more at www.marzocchi.com or from UK importers Windwave.