Having given you a flavour of the ride of the Santa Cruz Blur LTc a little while ago, here’s its little brother the Santa Cruz Blur XC. Unlike the carbon version of the LT, which runs alongside the existing alu frame, the carbon XC supersedes the aluminium bike.

The big news about the new Santa Cruz Blur XC is that it’s Santa Cruz’s first production carbon fibre frame. The company’s been relatively late to the magic-blanket party, but clearly it’s been biding its time, waiting until it can do a good job. On paper they’d seem to have succeeded. All of the popular axes of stiffness are improved and rather than merely shaving weight, Santa Cruz has managed to hack off an entire pound compared to the alu frame. At 4.2lb including shock, it’s properly light.

The frame construction has much in common with the LTc – carbon fibre main frame, swingarm and upper VPP link, forged lower link with grease ports, locking collet-head pivot hardware, extra bearing seals, all that. With integrated headsets becoming ever-more commonplace, it’s slightly surprising to see a pair of regular headset cups at the front of the XC2, and actually quite unusual on a carbon frame. No complaints here, though.

The frame clearly doesn’t have the outright volume of the LTc, which isn’t at all surprising considering the weight. It’s still plenty stiff, it’s just that the stiffness isn’t the first thing you notice. The first thing you notice with the XC is the weight, or rather lack thereof. The demo bike came in somewhere around 22lb and will properly fly up hills if you’ve got the legs. The 105mm of suspension travel is more sports car than Land Rover – “taut” is the increasingly-overused key word here.

Riding the XC immediately after its longer-travel and altogether burlier LTc brother was perhaps a little unfair. With two-thirds of the travel, narrow short-knob tyres and no handy bar-mounted seat-dropping lever, attacking the same trails at the same pace as on the bigger bike was initially unnerving. You couldn’t expect the XC to be as ultimately capable as the bigger bike and, well, it isn’t. But it’s very light, very fast and has an inspiringly sprightly feel. It’s also got geometry that’s a little more trail than race (69.5° with a typical 100mm fork), which boosts confidence. Compared to the bigger bike you may need to actually ride it a little more on the descents, but you’ll always be ahead on the climbs.

It occurred to us while riding the XC that, with meatier tyres and a slightly longer fork (both of which it’ll happily accommodate), it’d make a fantastic lightweight trail bike – indeed, we’re told that a fair few people at Santa Cruz HQ in California ride that very setup, with 2.3in tyres and a 120mm fork. For racing (and getting in over your head), though, the setup as ridden is just the ticket. One thing that you won’t be able to do is fit SRAM’s forthcoming XX twin-ring chainset to it – the Blur’s wide lower link and generous tyre clearance mean that it won’t fit. We wouldn’t let that put us off the frame, though…

As well as being lighter and shorter travel than the LTc, the XC is also (slightly) cheaper, although still a whole hill of money at £,2300 with a RockShox Monarch 3.3 shock. Complete bikes start at £3,470. Find out more at www.santacruzbikes.co.uk.