If you’re a diligent watcher of freeride videos. follower of pretty much any MTB media at all or indeed simply someone who doesn’t live in a cave, you’ll probably have noticed the wealth of slopestyle competitions going on around the world. “Competitive freeride” (surely an oxymoron, but we’ll run with it for now) is moving away from the Red Bull Rampage enormo-drop style and towards a a more flowy wall ride/gap jump/hip/double kind of thing – think Crankworx or Adidas Slopestyle. And the various bike parks being built around the place are going the same way.

Needless to say, trails and bikes develop in some sort of loose parallel, and big-travel bikes built to drop off cliffs tend to be a bit of handful in this kind of park. So there’s a lot of movement in the short(ish) travel, agile but still fairly beefy frame arena, teamed with a big single-crown fork. Early entrants were bikes like Specialized’s Enduro SX (not to be confused with the SX Trail) and more recently we’ve got Santa Cruz’s Blur 4X, which was designed for 4X (no, really) but lends itself admirably to park riding too.

This, then, is the forthcoming Transition BottleRocket. It’s got 5.5in of travel on a generally low-slung frame – relatively low bottom bracket, super-low top tube and fairly upright angles for a nimble ride. The one-piece rocker link is said to achieve excellent stiffness, and the bike really does look rather splendid. Prices and stuff as soon as Transition has decided what they’ll be…