We’ve already told you about the new Carbon legged rigid Pace fork (which will enter production as the RC31) but there are evolution of all the major 2000 forks AND a whole new family of forks…The super-light, remote lock out Air Force fork will become the Air Force II. Differences will include some internal meddling with the air valve mount, and braided cable for the lockout. But the big changes are a new removable cantilever mount that “flows” into the upper seal housing from behind the brace, rather than the old band on versions, and there will be a new CN crown fitted with a lighter cold forged steerer. There’s a slightly lighter lockout lever body planned too, but that won’t be appearing till well into 2001.

The Evo III becomes the Pro Class II and gets the same new V brake mounts and cold forged steerer as the Air Force II, the air and coil spring will be replaced by a 5 stage set of progressive coil springs which can be fettled to give 80 or 100mm of travel.Stop press:

More comprehensive details on their upside down fork – Thinner stanchions at bottom sliding inside thick upper legs – that we saw about a year ago, but nobody would talk about. Adrian Carter (Pace head honcho) confirmed they’d been working on it for about two years and were releasing it “shortly” as disc brakes (an essential on upside down forks) have now reached such a level of acceptance.

The RC37 Invert is the first of a whole family of Invert forks, designed to square up against longer travel forks such as the Rock Shox Psylo and Marzocchi Z1. The RC37 also moves away from Pace’s traditional carbon outers by using a cold forged and CNC machined 46mm diameter upper leg, with cro-mo lowers and a 20mm pull through QR axle with side flats for full torsional stiffness. The internals are also completely new with an open bath oil damper and linear coil spring on one side, adjustable for 100 or 120mm of travel, and a new “self energising air spring” in the other leg. essentially an air piston with a port that clears when fully extended. The “spring” gulps in air at the top of the stroke then provides progressive compression resistance. This can be adjusted by altering (via a screw cap in the top of the leg) the length of the air chamber to increase or decrease progressiveness, and as leaks aren’t really important (it tops itself up every stroke remember) there are no sealing issues or religous maintenance etc. to worry about. Best of all the target price is £299 – a whole new mid range ballpark for Pace.

The Invert family is planned to extend to lighter race forks, and possibly bigger DH forks, but don’t ring up and ask for them now, they’ve only made one prototype of the RC37 so far and the rest probably haven’t even been coloured in on the drawing board yet.