Bible Review: Revel Ranger | X01 Kit | $7,200
The new Revel Ranger is as quick as it is capable, as fun as it is fast, and it’s downright stunning to look at. It’s Revel’s answer to the booming category of bikes perfectly suited for retiring cross-country racers, otherwise known as ‘down-country,’ the dumbest term to come out of mountain biking since ‘anti-rise.’ You know what anti-rise is? It’s brake-jacking. Yup, bike industry juggernauts took a bad thing and magically made it a good thing. Outstanding.
Whatever we decide to call it (it’s going to be down-country isn’t it?) the bikes emerging in this category are fun as hell, and the Ranger is among the best of them to date. It inspired our most anti-Strava reviewers to test their mettle on the most torturous sections of the punishing test loop. None of the testers on hand are really the racing type these days, but like any true mountain biker, we’re all down for some good old fashioned masochism, and the Ranger had a way of luring that side of us out to come out and party.
It sports 115 millimeters of rear-wheel travel, paired with 120 millimeters up front, and the build we chose came dressed with the new and very sporty-feeling RockShox SID Ultimate fork and SID Luxe shock, a setup that pairs nicely with this platform. Revel also offers a Fox Float DPS shock and 34 step-cast fork option as well, for riders looking for a slightly more supple setup or wanting to edge a touch farther into an overall trail bike feel. When configured with SID dampers, the Ranger is energetic. Heck, it bordered on impatient, reprimanding us anytime we weren’t pinning it.
The Ranger does not support lazy riding, literally. When soft-pedaling up climbs, the Ranger’s CBF suspension platform bobbed more than testers expected or preferred. It wasn’t enough to qualify for what we sometimes like to call Saggy Butt Syndrome—the bike’s pedaling platform kicked in before it felt like it was sucking energy—but it was more active than, say, the Yeti SB115. However, the suspension had an overall less racey and more supple feel than the SB115, which plenty of folks might prefer. Plus, once we got off our lazy asses and put the power down, the Ranger hopped straight to attention. The harder you pedal it, the more efficient it becomes. But we couldn’t help but wonder how the bike might perform with a steeper seat angle. Positioning the rider’s weight farther forward can help reduce unwanted bobbing and prevent front-wheel wandering on steep climbs, and the Ranger’s relatively slack 75.3-degree seat tube angle is not on the cutting edge of current trends.
Still, the Ranger is thoroughly agile, and we found it more than agreeable patrolling a wide variety of terrain. Skilled riders are rewarded with a nice, stiff chassis and plenty of bottoming support. It wasn’t hard to use up every bit of the Ranger’s 115 millimeters of suspension, but that’s partially because the bike is so comfortable going fast. Yes, the gnarly rock gardens slowed the Ranger down a bit more than they did the Evil Following or YT Izzo, but those bikes, spec’d the way we tested them, are in a different category. For what is essentially on the extreme XC end of the trail spectrum, the Ranger we tested was stunningly capable. Testers walked away fully impressed by the SID suspension. Kudos to RockShox for making SID products appealing to riders who live entirely outside course tape but still prefer efficiency over comfort—and props to Revel for speccing it.
It isn’t just the suspension spec that gives the Ranger its lovely mix of light-footed maneuverability and calming control. Each angle and tube length plays a role in making the Ranger feel the way it does. The 67.5-degree head angle seems quite steep, but is calmed by the reduced 44-millimeter offset fork, which results in superbly accurate steering that can still hang onto a line at speed. It’s sort of like having an XC bike with a get-out-of-jail-free card. The 473-millimeter reach is long for cross-country standards and conservative for current trail and enduro standards, which seems reasonable for a bike positioned between the two. It fit our testers naturally and comfortably, and we made notes that the Ranger immediately felt like a glove we’d already broken in. Everything, with a slight exception of the seat tube angle, was perfectly in place, including the Goldilocks chainstay length of 436 millimeters. Revel doesn’t do size-specific rear-centers but chose a nice middle-of-the-road figure that should feel comfortable to most riders across the size range.
We were all enamored with the Ranger until a bit of a wrench got thrown in the works. Actually, a rock. A piece of gravel got lodged between the chainstay bridge and bottom bracket shell. It sounded like a creak, and by the time we diagnosed the noise and located the rock, it had worn a deep hole in the carbon. Revel has solid warranty and crash replacement programs to cover all kinds of issues, but it’d be nice to see some sort of guard integrated into the bike to prevent this type of damage from occurring. The Maxxis Rekon tire that comes on the Ranger doesn’t pick up half the amount of rocks that more aggressive knobbies do.
Like, for instance, the Maxxis Dissector, which Revel specs on the front of the Ranger. If not for this choice, the Ranger may have been the lightest bike in the test, but we commend Revel for running such a truly superb and capable front tire. If you haven’t tried the Dissector yet, we highly recommend it. We also recommend Revel’s wheels, which come standard on the SRAM X0-level build. They represent a great blend of stiffness, support, and comfort. We loved the Enve M6 handlebar, but the Truvativ Descendant stem seemed out of place. It’s a nice, good-looking stem and all, but we’d expect to see an Enve bar bolted to an Enve stem. To be fair, though, the Enve stem is more than four times the price of the Truvativ one.
The Ranger is a boutique bike that comes with a price tag to match. $7,200 is almost two grand more than the comparably equipped YT Izzo, but the Ranger has a very unique ride quality and insanely attractive aesthetics that appeal to riders looking to buy their next dream machine. Revel offers the Ranger in black as well, but you’d be crazy not to go for that green.
