• Santa Cruz Nomad
• £1,549 frame only (painted – anodised £1,699). Complete bikes from £2,899
• 6.5in of VPP travel
• One bike to do it all?

The Nomad is the most recent addition to Santa Cruz’s VPP suspension line-up, and fills the travel gap between the 5.3in travel Blur LT and 8.5in travel VP-Free. The pitch with the Nomad is “versatility” – Santa Cruz is selling this bike as a do-it-all mount, blending the Free’s stout build and suspension performance with nimble handling, low weight and pedalability. So does it have all the bases covered or does it fall between various stools? Read on…

Frame

It’s been a while since a bike attracted as many comments about its appearance as the Nomad. Santa Cruz has been doing interestingly-curved hydroformed top tubes on a couple of its bikes for a while, but the Nomad takes things to a whole new level of swoopiness. The engineers can come up with all sorts of justifications for it – big weld area up front, big, stiff, tube, that upper linkage pivot needs to be exactly there so that’s where the tube has to go before meeting the seat cluster a bit higher up – but no-one’s pretending that it isn’t the way it is mostly for looks. And in a world of me-too mountain bikes, we’ve got to admire that. As with all slightly out-of-the-ordinary designs, it was mostly disliked on first viewing but now, a few months down the line, is often loved. We’ve noticed three things: first, it looks better in real life than it does in pictures; second, it looks better being ridden that standing still and riderless and third, you can’t see it when you’re riding it. For the record, we like the way it looks really quite a lot. There’s a slightly awkward juxtaposition of curvy tubes and straight tubes, but we like the way the top tube mirrors the SC logo, how its curve follows through to the extra struts in the rear triangle, the straight line of the seat stays running through the shock and, ooh, all sorts of things.

The frame is made from 6061 and 6069 aluminium, and there’s more to the tubing than funky shapes – there’s a lot of butting and other internal cleverness going on in there to make the chassis as strong and light as possible. A large Nomad frame weighs about 3.3kg (7.3lb) – not at all bad for 6.5in of travel. The nature of the construction means that there’s a lot of welding on the frame (even the upper suspension linkage is two halves welded together) – the test frame was a pre-production one with the odd wibbly weld, but production ones are somewhat neater.

Santa Cruz never used to use replaceable derailleur hangers, and indeed some of its range still doesn’t have them. Its thinking is that replaceable hangers tend to be flexible, hindering shifting accuracy and then failing when they really shouldn’t. It always used to use big thick dropouts instead, which you could actually bend back a couple of times (although they were pretty hard to bend in the first place). Most of the recent SC bikes, though, have a one-piece detachable drive-side dropout rather than just the hanger, thus giving the frame a bit more repairability without compromising hanger stiffness.

There’s now six VPP bikes in the SC line-up. The design, using two contra-rotating short links between the main triangle and swingarm, is fundamentally the same across all of them but with tweaked geometry to suit the application. One of the distinguishing features of the system is an S-shaped axle path which tends to make the bike want to sit at a certain point in the travel under power for more stable pedalling. That’s a very pronounced effect on the short-travel Blur but considerably less pronounced on the long-travel Nomad – the goal here is plushness and control first while maintaining good pedalling prowess.

All of the suspension pivots run on sealed bearings which are reassuringly covered up rather than left exposed to the elements. At first sight we expected the lower linkage to form an effective mud-gathering shelf, but in practice the curved swingarm struts seem to guide most mud the other way. Tyre clearances are ample, but not gigantic – there was plenty of room around the chunky 2.35in Maxxis Minions on the test bike but you wouldn’t want to run anything substantially bigger than that.

Components

You’ve got a lot of options when it comes to buying a Nomad. You can buy a frame (£1,549 for a painted one, £1,699 for an anodised one, both with Fox Float R shocks – various shock upgrades are available, if you want a Fox DHX Air that’ll be another £200) and build it up how you want it. Or you can go for one of Santa Cruz’s build kits. Entry level is £2,899 which gets you a painted frame with RP3 shock kitted out with a Shimano LX transmission (with XT rear mech), Avid Juicy 5 brakes, XT hubs, Mavic XM321 rims, Kenda Nevegal tyres, WTB saddle and Race Face Evolve bar, stem and seatpost. Top of the line would be the £3,499 X.0 kit on anodised frame option – SRAM X.0 transmission, Truvativ Stylo Team cranks, Juicy 7 brakes, Hope hubs, WTB Weirwolf tyres, Thomson seatpost and stem, Race FAce bars, Hope headset. And of course there are various points inbetween.

The well-used demo bike arrived with mostly Shimano XT kit, supplemented by Avid Juicy 7 brakes. The fork was a Pace RC41 Fighter with 150mm of travel and handy lock-down mode. Mavic XM321 rims and Maxxis Minion 2.35 tyres made for a fairly beefy wheel package. The whole lot came in at 14.2kg (31.24lb) on the BM scales.

Ride

The Nomad gives itself a lot to live up to. Santa Cruz is pushing the “versatility” angle – this is meant to be a bike that can do pretty much everything. Once upon a time that wouldn’t have been a very bold claim – everything was a rigid, usually steel, bike so you had to do everything on it. And of course “everything” didn’t cover quite as much of a range of riding as it does now.

The other thing is that there are a lot of long-travel all-rounders out there now, so competition is pretty stiff. We were wondering what else the Nomad could bring to the party and, to be honest, were expecting to be slightly underwhelmed.

But we weren’t. Quite the opposite. This thing is fantastic. And in so many ways that we hardly know where to start, so we’ll just dive in with examples of things we love about it. First, it pedals really well. It’s not hardtail-solid but most of the time it feels like a taut 4in travel bike. There’s just enough chain growth and the rate curves are finely honed to keep it feeling sprightly while still letting the back end snuffle out every last bit of traction. Impressively, given the notably relaxed head angle (about 68-68.5° with a typical 150mm travel fork) it’s not at all bad at holding a line on climbs. Looking at the numbers you’d expect it to wander a lot more than it does. We think that that’s down to the tendency of the rear suspension to prefer to sit at its sag point rather than settle further into it on climbs as with many long-travel bikes – with the back sitting a little higher your weight stays further over the front and keeps things running straight. It’s also got quite long (17.5in) chainstays, which again helps the weight distribution. We still used the Pace fork’s lock-down feature on really steep stuff, but more because it was there than because we felt we couldn’t do without it.

Obviously it’s also an entirely acceptable weight. People will try to tell you that 30+ lb is too much for all-day rides in the hills – they’re wrong. Obviously our perspective is slanted by the fact that our very first bikes were over 30lb and didn’t have suspension or disc brakes or anything, but still, it’s a perfectly respectable weight. A Nomad wouldn’t be our first choice for an XC race but for trail riding it’s just fine.

And then there’s the descents, which is where the fun really starts. The Nomad is an absolute cracker. It’s perfectly balanced, it’s incredibly capable but it remains involving. You don’t get that hovercraft feel that some bikes have, where the whole trail, lumps and all, just vanishes under the wheels – you can tell that there’s stuff down there. But that doesn’t mean that the suspension’s not working, far from it. You’re getting all of the traction and control benefits but you’re getting useful feedback too. The Nomad makes you want to work the trail far more than some long-travel bikes – it loves to be pinged off rocks and roots and jumped about the place, rather than just swallowing any attempt you make to launch it. But if you don’t want to do that it’ll just chew through anything you aim it at without complaint.

It’s hard to tell how strong it is, but we’re willing to bet that it’s strong enough to take on anything that most riders feel up to tackling, especially with the right choice of parts – it’ll run up to a 180mm travel fork, which gives you some idea of what Santa Cruz reckons it should be capable of. It was certainly unfazed by high-speed boulder chutes and drops – just stay centred and hang on.

So can it do it all? Nearly. It’s not light enough for full-on XC racing and doesn’t feel quite the right shape for DHing on a proper course, but for pretty much all points in between it’s perfectly at home. You could find bikes that are better at certain things, but for sheer broad-based competence the Nomad can’t be beaten. Superb.

Positives: Versatile with a capital V, distinctive looks, light for what it is, great handling, involving ride, confidence inspiring

Negatives: You might not like the looks, we can’t afford one

Verdict

If you like collecting bikes then the Nomad probably isn’t for you – it’s likely to render about three of the things you’ve got redundant. And if you like to occupy a riding niche and don’t stray from it then you can probably find a more effective specialist tool. But if the smallest pigeonhole you like to be in is “mountain biker” and your riding is a mix of trails, jumps, drops, all day or a snatched half-hour, then we haven’t come across a better bike. It’s expensive, but not madly so in the context of either how much people are spending on bikes these days or of what it can do. If you consider yourself unlikely ever to need 6.5in of travel then you might want to look elsewhere, but there seems to be little disadvantage to having it. Better to have and not need than to need and not have, as a wise man once said. We love it.

Performance: 5/5
Value: 5/5
Overall: 5/5