Solid Strike World Cup

Reliability

With ‘reach’ at 453mm, a bottom bracket drop of -8mm which puts it at under 350mm, the Strike is about as bang on as you can get numbers wise, and with a wheelbase of 1270mm makes it longer than extra large Trek Session or Specialized Demo. In short it means business. Out on the trail the Strike is a stable bike, a quiet bike, and certainly one that holds good poise when charging into bigger terrain. There’s an impressive shape to this bike for sure.

“At 36lb it holds its ground with all the much higher priced opposition”

Starting at just over three thousand euros the Strike features some quality componentry. There is a fair spread of Reverse components featured on the Strike including bar, stem, crankset, seatpost, grips, headset, chainguide and wheelset. The key message here is that its all lightweight and reliable componentry from Solid’s own brand as we found when we had the bike for test last year. Elsewhere Magura anchors the bike with braking and Sram’s superb X01 DH seven speed system offers the best shifting in the business.

New for this year is the Bos Void rear damper and Idylle Rare FCV, these are also the units being used by Schmid’s new team, and notably one of the biggest UCI team’s on the circuit – Solid-Reverse Factory Racing – which has former World Downhill Champion Morgane Charre, and top UK racer’s Harry Molloy and Joe Connell on board the Strike’s with the famous Toulouse suspension, Bos, holding them in line.

YOU DIDN’T KNOW THIS BUT…

Matthias Reichmann, Solid Bikes Engineer

I think that to many people it is unclear who Solid Bikes are. We are a really small company with and extremely high efficiency in every discipline – each business division consists of one highly dedicated person. The key people are:

Peter Schmid: The owner

Heike Schmid: Peter’s structured side, she cares for the accounting and controlling

Matthias Reichmann: Design Engineer / head of R&D.

Johannes Koehler: Marketing

Harry Molloy: Team Manager

We build the bikes that we believe are the best possible rides for gravity oriented riders, as we simply build the bikes we would love to ride ourselves. All of us share a common passion for downhill riding, technical trail riding and picking our lines on the highest mountain ridges we can possibly find. The demand for a solid and purpose built bike is even higher, when you ride high altitude trails close to some glaciers and the next bike shop would be a two day walk away. This is why all our bikes will feature unique gimmicks such as spare derailleur hangers and as our name may suggest we believe it is better for most riders to focus on the safer side, rather than shaving the last gram away from our constructions.

So who are we? Well we are like you! We love to spend as much time as possible on the trails and we really hate to wrench our bikes. We love to chat with our customers to learn from them or to evaluate what they need. Our bikes are not the standard mass production bikes, even if we run a direct sales model we still have a fair grade of individualization to offer for our customers. Most customers turn into friends or at least become part of our Solid Family.

Solid is proud to say that we reinvest a decent amount of our money into the development of the sport, into trail-building, our bikes and our UCI team rather than focusing on profit optimization.

Peter Schmidt: “What most people don’t know: Our bikes are not built on an assembly line – they are all built-up in our small company own workshop in Freudenstadt. One by one, each bike at a time.”