An Open Love Letter to Norco
As a young, penniless teenager one of my favourite things to do was walk around in bike shops looking at everything I couldn’t afford. Of course back in those days you actually had to leave your house to go look at stuff you wanted to buy – no smartphones, no socials. Browsing the magazines at a local newsagent was always an option too!
I loved the smell of the tyres. I loved seeing new technology and trends emerge from model year to model year. I would tally up the thousands of dollars needed to acquire whatever model I lusted after at the time….then I’d go buy $5 worth of stickers for my school books and I’d leave pretty happy.
One day, I walked past a bike I simply couldn’t NOT have. The year was 2007. I was 17 years old. The bike was a Norco Atomik – in its day a proper downhill rig with triple clamp Boxxer forks and a coil rear shock ‘with a piggyback’ (I had NO concept of the inner workings of any of this stuff back then, I just knew it was awesome) This was back when “next years models” used to hit bike shop floors quite a long way ahead of time, so I was looking at a 2008 model bike during the spring of 2007.
Here’s the best part…..back in 2007….the full sticker price on this monster truck of a bike? $2,999. Mum made me promise to do chores to help pay for it…..and we layby’d it. About 9 weeks later it was paid for, I picked it up and rode home via the trails around Lake Joondalup (no pavement back then!) and unknowingly began what would be a lifelong love affair with Norco bikes.
The 2008 Norco Atomik (pictured below, credit to PinkBike) was basically a 2007 TEAM DH frame with minor tweaks for lower spec parts. Didn’t matter to me. Might as well have been a spaceship.
I rode and raced that bike for a few years, and captured one of the most amazing crash-photo sequences of my life thanks to a friends mum who drove us out to the track and was snapping photos (images below)
I held onto the Atomik for as long as I could, but the pressure of young adulthood, marriage, our first house and the arrival of the first of 3 kids in quick succession made me sell it. Same as every other man who sells his toys at the first sign of adult responsibilities, I don’t think I absolutely HAD to sell it…but….I did. Oh well.
It would be 6 years before I got back on a Norco – I spent the interim years aboard different versions of the Giant Reign – first the 26″ wheeled version that I conquered the Megavalanche on, then the updated version on 27.5″ carbon wheels. I went through 3 sets of warranty wheels on that bike…..all handled by the same shop owners that put up with me taking an hour to buy $5 worth of stickers a few years prior. They seem to have forgiven me, it’s all good 🙂
Fast forward to 2018. The Local Spokesman had been up and running for a year now, and it was time to get a new race bike for the Gravity Enduro series, and I desperately wanted to get back on a Norco. The 2018 Norco Sight A1 stole my heart, with it’s Candy Apple metallic green paint and sophisticated Fox suspension front and rear. I wrote a review for that bike that you can read here.
This was the bike I always wished the Reign was. It was just a magic carpet ride. It was nimble. Plush. Supportive. Predictable……and then I snapped the rear end in half. It was replaced under warranty….but it spooked me into selling yet another dream bike to focus on my young business and try not to break any more bones.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this generation Sight, along with pretty much every other dual suspension bike in the Norco line-up at the time was the brainchild of Senior Design Engineer Owen Pemberton, who went on to found Forbidden Bike Co. Owen’s engineering input and the very deliberate decisions around pivot placement, kinematics and shock tuning were years ahead of the industry – where they stay to this day. Chainstay lengths that grow with frame size still aren’t the industry standard, but for Norco they are non-negotiable. Greg Minnaar, who for my entire bike-life has been a Santa Cruz guy, now bleeds the brown dirt of Norco’s home town trails in British Columbia. And he had plenty of good things to say in a recent interview with PinkBike
Finally…….August 2023…..Globally, the cycling industry was starting to make big price corrections to keep product moving through stores and into the hands of new owners. I’m loathe to call it discounting, prices really did just go back to where they USED to be before all the COVID induced insanity took hold. Anyway, Norco’s Australian Importer made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. An order was placed for a 2023 Norco Sight A1. I took a calculated risk and ordered large, despite Norco’s online sizing tool insisting that I was DEEP into XL territory. I just didn’t think the not-so-formidable terrain I would be riding really warranted THAT much bike.
And so……my new baby arrived early September 2023. What a glorious thing. I actually wrote an in depth review of the new Sight but it got lost during a website changeover late last year. No big deal, but I had a LOT of good things to say about it.
This blog entry was never meant to be a review anyway – just an opportunity to put 17 years worth of brand appreciation into words. So what is it about the brand that speaks to me?
It’s hard to do this without just rattling off clichés, so I’ll start with something a bit different – the people behind the scenes. David Cox now leads the design and engineering team, and he’s ex-Mclaren Automotive. Engineers rarely go from the automotive world to cycling, usually they go the other way. Colin Ryan is Norco’s in-house Suspension Wizard. Suspension input for most OEM’s is usually provided by the company providing the shocks being specc’d for the model, NOT from someone on their own payroll. I find these two guys to be doing amazing work, I wish I knew who else was on the team so I could give them some props too!
Ok….cliche’ time:
Norco say that dirt is in their DNA, and it’s just so true. You can feel it. When the tyres hit the trail, the bike knows it’s home. The stiffness of the rear frame pivots, lined with double row, high quality bearings that don’t wash out in the first wet ride. The plush, supportive tune of the rear shock, that doesn’t even come with a climb switch (but does have LSC) because the bike has such good climbing manners.
The rider triangle (hands, feet ‘n’ bum cheeks) is so comfortable. Even with the seat post up at full extension it still feels like you ride ‘in the bike’ rather than on it. Norco have their own Ride Aligned setup guide that got me shockingly close to my ultimate setup pressures/ measurements. Somehow, no matter if you’re climbing, descending or just ripping flatter trails, the amount of weight on each contact patch just seems to be ‘right’. Wherever the centre of mass is, the bike just seems to pivot around it. It dances. It follows commands, and it offers up casual suggestions. Get a section wrong and it will do everything it can to save you. Get a section right and it just vanishes behind you at ever-increasing pace. It’s magic.
Beyond how their bikes ride, just look at how you can trace a single, perfectly straight line down the frame from the stem to the rear axle. It’s beautiful to look at. It’s easy to apply frame protection to. The 4 bar linkage is easy to work on. The spacer/bearing/hardware configurations have clearly been designed by people who work on their own bikes and are worthy of a Nobel Peace Prize.
So, look. This is all just a very long winded way of saying that I am as big a fan of Norco as ever. I am a massive fan of the engineering. I’m excited to see what Minnaar can do with the downhill team. I’m looking forward to the next generation of bikes….maybe I’ll finally add an Optic to the stable!
