The Marin Mount Vision has, in its various incarnations, been around for quite a while. But the various versions and developments have all had one thing in common – they’ve all been, at heart, race bikes. More recently, the Marin Mount Vision has become a race bike that you can happily ride all day. For 2007, though, there’s an all-new Mount Vision, and now it’s a trail bike that you can race on.

That might sound like a distinction of such subtlety as to be almost meaningless, but we think it has merit. The new Mount Vision uses the Quad Link II rear suspension design, as already seen on the Marin Quake and Whyte E-5. It’s got 120mm of travel out back, the same as the E-5. It’s not just an E-5 with an aluminium swingarm, though. The geometry of the linkages is tweaked to deliver somewhat more linear travel, but they’re still all contained within the front triangle, out of the dirt and allowing a full-length, uninterrupted seat tube.

The Mount Vision has also taken on a new, swoopy look. At first glance, the curvy, hydroformed top tube looks like it might just be funkily-shaped for the sake of it, but there is a practical justification – the shape simultaneously offers plenty of standover height without requiring yards of seatpost extension while maintaining space for a water bottle inside the front triangle.

Four bikes in the range share the new frame design, ranging from the £1,375 East Peak to the £3,300 Mount Vision Pro. All the bikes have 120mm front forks to match the rear travel – Marzocchi MX Pros on the East Peak and various flavours of Fox 32 Float on the others.

We’ve had a brief ride on the new Mount Vision, and first impressions are very good indeed. The difference between the 2007 and 2006 bikes are immediately clear. The new bike is a little more relaxed and has noticeably more rearward weight bias once on board, although not to the extent of making it wandery on climbs. Raceheads may want to fit a lower stem or a flat bar, but the rest of the world will probably be happy with it as it is. Production bikes will have slightly longer seat tubes than the bike pictured here, with a forward-facing clamp slot. They’ll also come with 380mm seatposts, so you’re less likely to be stranded between sizes.

The most impressive thing about the new platform is the rear suspension performance. The almost magical small-bump Hoovering of the old bike is still intact, but the new bike ramps up a lot less from the mid-stroke, so you get to use more of the travel more of the time. Despite that, it’s very stable under power – you’ll notice a difference if you fiddle with the Fox RP23’s ProPedal lever, but we suspect that most riders will leave it fully open for everything except roads or very smooth climbs.

So the early signs are very good – we’ll have a full test soon. Before that, though, there’s the rest of the Marin range to check out – more on that shortly…