If you’re going to spend 11 years developing a bike it may as well be a looker and that’s exactly what Hope has done here.

Hope doesn’t necessarily have any dreams of becoming a bike manufacturer, but it has always been the dream of its founders, Simon and Ian, to at least produce one complete bike.

The result is the HB11 which has been teased on Instagram for weeks but was finally unveiled at Sea Otter this week in California. There are not currently any plans for it to go into production as it is simply not profitable for the company to do so, but Hope has asked us to keep an eye on them for possible plans in the future.

The HB 11is a fully carbon 160mm enduro/all-mountain bike that was built in-house at the Barnoldswick factory and is interestingly standards free.

Hope knew this was always going to be a design project, not a commercial one, so it could rip up the bike design rule book and build the exact frame it wanted, not constrained by current industry standards dictated by component companies. So for example the rear hub is 17mm with a 25 mm location to maximise stiffness.