Today former top world cup downhill racer Cesar Rojo and his colleagues launch Unno bikes form their design headquarters in Barcelona.
Unno comes with the explicit aim of producing truly one-off handcrafted mountainbikes that bring the term ‘premium’ to a level quite different to what is currently on offer. Their new carbon bikes form hardtail to long travel downhill will be available in limited numbers later this year.
The project has been four years in the making, although Cesar is no stranger to mountainbike design and was a key figure in the making of Forward Geometry and Zero suspension. It’s now over seven years ago since we first visited the Barcelona man prior to the Summum downhill bike becoming production. This put Mondraker quite unique, ahead of the game for a while before others tried to emulate them.
But its not just bicycles that the team based out on impressive former textile factory have gained their experience, but in motorcycles such as KTM, Gas Gas and the impressive Jota Gas trials s bike. It’s all high end stuff at Cero Design, and as Rojo points out “everyone involved at Unno knows what they’re doing.”
Cesar, the current World Masters champion was a successful also racer for the Global Racing downhill team run by Martin Whiteley in 2001/2001 season and was good for top ten places missing out on the podium in the final Les Gets round of ’02 by one tenth, the race that saw Peaty, Barel, Vouilloz within a second of each other.
We visited Cesar at the end of 2014 whilst documenting the history of downhill bikes of which he is key player, pictured below on a lurid December evening with some of the Summum proto’s. But scroll down and see a great insight video into just what UNNO are about.