2026 Orbea Rallon
Wheel Size: 29’’ front / 27.5’’ rear
Travel:
- Frame: 200 mm
- Fork: 203 mm
Geometry Highlights:
- Sizes Offered: Small, Medium, Large, XL
- Headtube Angle: 63.8° (adjustable)
- Reach: 473 mm (size Large)
- Chainstay Length: 442 or 450 mm
Frame Material: Carbon Fiber
Price: Complete Bike: $8,299
Wheel Size: 29’’ or 29’’ front / 27.5’’ rear
Travel:
- Frame: 170 mm
- Fork: 180 mm
Geometry Highlights:
- Sizes Offered: Small, Medium, Large, XL
- Headtube Angle: 64.25° (high setting)
- Seat Tube Angle: ~79° (effective, high setting, varies slightly by frame size)
- Reach: 478 mm (size Large)
Chainstay Length: 442 or 450 mm
Frame Material: Carbon Fiber
Price: Complete Bikes $5,699 to $9,999
Intro
We’ve been big fans of the last couple of iterations of the Orbea Rallon, but they stood out for being notably lively, efficient, sharp-handling takes on a modern Enduro bike. The new iteration, though, is adaptable to both DH and Enduro bike configurations, with some big changes to the suspension kinematics, frame layout, and geometry to match. The new Rallon has also already been ridden to a World Cup DH win under Tahnée Seagrave, at the opening round of the 2025 season in Poland.
We’ll have a Rallon in for review soon, but in the meantime, let’s check out what Orbea has come up with.
The Frame
The big news here is that the Rallon is now set up to convert between being an Enduro bike and a DH bike — and even more interestingly, Orbea talks about it as a DH bike first and an Enduro one second. Their take is that Downhill racing is winning out over Enduro as a spectator sport, and that Enduro bike sales are falling in favor of long-travel eMTBs, so focusing on the DH side of things makes sense.
The new Rallon is offered in carbon fiber only and uses Orbea’s typical linkage-driven single pivot suspension layout, with a pivot concentric to the rear axle to help separate anti-squat and anti-rise behavior. In contrast to the outgoing Rallon, the shock on the new version is mounted vertically.
The Rallon produces 200 mm of rear wheel travel in DH mode, by way of a 225 x 75 mm shock; the Enduro setup drops down to a 205 x 62.5 mm one, with swappable lower shock mounts (which Orbea calls “GravityLinks”) compensating for the different shock sizes. The GravityLink is hidden underneath the large bolt-on downtube guard, and Orbea has positioned the shock as low in the frame as possible (by having it pierce the downtube) to lower the bike’s center of gravity. Both the DH and Enduro versions of the GravityLink feature a flip chip to toggle between two progressivity settings for the rear suspension; the Enduro links also bake some geometry adjustability into the link (more on that in a minute). The Rallon also comes with an angle-adjusting headset, which allows for +/- 0.75° of headtube angle adjustment on either end of the middle neutral setting.
The Rallon frame uses 148 x 12 mm Boost axle spacing — the reigning standard for XC, Trail, and Enduro bikes, which we’re seeing pop up more and more on DH bikes of late — with a SRAM UDH hanger. The cable routing is internal and fully guided (but not through the headset — we’re thankfully seeing a retreat from that routing in the MTB world), and the Rallon features downtube storage and water bottle bosses inside the front triangle. Orbea’s “FLP” multi-tool — essentially a small tool with 2, 3, 4, and 5 mm Allen wrenches, which is stored magnetically inside the rocker link pivot — carries over to the new Rallon, and a snap-in handle for the rear axle includes a 6 mm Allen key as well.
The way that Orbea describes the suspension performance of the new Rallon stands in stark contrast to our experience with earlier versions. The Rallon has historically pedaled quite efficiently, and featured notably lively, poppy suspension that gave up some composure at speed on really rough trails in trade; Orbea says that the new one is much more active and supple, and notes that the Enduro configuration is optimized for electronically-controlled suspension (e.g., Fox Live Valve Neo) to still pedal efficiently while offering better downhill performance.
The Rallon is offered in three standard color combinations, but a vast array of custom options is available through their MyO configurator on their website, along with a bunch of build spec customization options that we’ll touch on below.
Rallon DH
The DH configuration for the Rallon is a dedicated mixed-wheel affair. A flip chip in the lower shock mount toggles between two suspension progression settings, at about 25% and 30% progression, both in straight-ish lines that flatten out a touch deeper in the travel.
Orbea says that minimizing pedal kickback and keeping the suspension as active as possible were major goals for the Rallon’s kinematics, and their published figures for the DH setup have anti-rise starting at just under 65% before trailing off to about 57%, with very low anti-squat (just over 50% at topout, and almost 0% by the end of travel, in a 34-16 gear), and under three degrees of total pedal kickback (though the center of gravity height used to produce those figures aren’t stated).
The Rallon Enduro can be configured with either mixed wheels or a full 29er setup, with two different versions of the Enduro GravityLink handling the swap. Both feature a four-position flip chip that offers two different suspension progression options (22.5 and 27.5%) plus high and low geometry settings. A single 553-gram bolt-on weight is offered for the Enduro setup.
Orbea has made a point of giving the Rallon the most dropper post options possible, both by making the seat tubes notably short, and by maintaining a lot of insertion depth. They say that you can bottom a 240 mm dropper post to the collar on all frame sizes and that most folks should be able to run at least a 210 mm dropper, if not a 240 mm one, across the entire size range.
(That, of course, also applies to the DH configuration too, but is a lot less relevant in that arena.)
The leverage curve for the Rallon in the Enduro configuration is quite similar to that of the DH setup, just with the last 30 mm of travel lopped off (hence the slight reduction in progression); the anti-rise on the Enduro setup is a touch higher (starting at around 66% and falling to just over 60%), and the anti-squat figures are considerably higher (starting just under 100% and falling to just over 60%), though it’s worth noting that those numbers are using a 34-50 gear, rather than the 34-16 used for the DH anti-rise numbers.
Fit & Geometry
The geometry of the two Rallon configurations is largely similar, but also quite adjustable. Both are offered in four sizes, Small through XL, with largely similar geometry (the DH setup is a touch slacker, as we’ll get to in a minute), as you’d expect given their shared frame.
Interestingly, Orbea has decided not to do size-specific chainstay lengths on the Rallon, and instead offers two versions of the rear triangle that produce 442 and 450 mm chainstay lengths, either of which can be chosen for any size bike in either the DH or Enduro setup at the time of ordering.
Orbea says that they looked into making the chainstay length adjustable rather than requiring specific rear ends, but that the packaging constraints with their dropout concentric pivot would require more compromises than they were comfortable with.
Rallon DH
In its DH configuration, the Rallon gets a 63.8° headtube angle (with +/- 0.75° adjustability via swappable headset cups), a 473 mm reach and 650.6 mm stack for the Large frame, and a 24.7 mm bottom bracket drop. Reach on the Small frame starts at 425 mm and grows by about 25 mm per size, up to 50 mm on the XL. The stack height changes by about 9 mm per size as well.
Rallon Enduro
The Enduro setup on the Rallon gets nearly identical geometry to the DH setup with the Enduro one in its low geometry position; the Enduro GravityLink features high and low settings on the flip chip, which let you add 0.5° to the headtube angle and 7 mm to the bottom bracket height, with corresponding tweaks to the other figures. And, once again, there’s also a +/- 0.75° angle adjusting headset and the option for 442 or 450 mm chainstays as well.
Orbea’s published chart for the Rallon shows it in the high position with the neutral headset, but their site will have a full configurator to walk through all the options after launch.
The Builds
Orbea offers the Rallon DH in a single build kit, with three options for the Enduro spec. All can be configured with your choice of the 442 or 450 mm chainstays, irrespective of frame size, and a number of build customizations are on offer through Orbea’s MyO program. The DH build just gets options for bar rise and material, but the Enduro ones get a range of shock options, wheel sizes, spare GravityLinks for other configurations, dropper post lengths, and more. Check out their website for details.
Rallon DH
- Drivetrain: Shimano Saint w/ Race Face Turbine crank
- Brakes: Shimano XTR w/ 203 mm Galfer Shark rotors
- Fork: Fox 40 Factory
- Shock: Fox Float X2
- Wheels: Oquo Mountain Control MC32TEAM
Rallon Enduro
- Drivetrain: Shimano SLX w/ Race Face Aeffect crank
- Brakes: Shimano Deore 4-piston
- Fork: Fox 38 Factory
- Shock: Fox Float X Performance Elite
- Wheels: Race Face ARC 30
- Dropper Post: OC Mountain Control MC22
- Drivetrain: Shimano SLX w/ XT derailleur and Race Face Turbine crank
- Brakes: Shimano XT 4-piston
- Fork: Fox 38 Factory
- Shock: Fox Float X2 Factory
- Wheels: Oquo Mountain Control MC32TEAM
- Dropper Post: OC Mountain Control MC10
- Drivetrain: SRAM X0 Transmission
- Brakes: Shimano XTR 4-piston
- Fork: Fox 38 Factory
- Shock: Fox Float X Factory Live Valve Neo
- Wheels: Oquo Mountain Control MC32LTD
- Dropper Post: OC Mountain Control MC10
Orbea’s house brand Oquo wheels now use DT Swiss Ratchet DEG internals (with the 72-point ratchet stock), and are featured on all of the Rallon builds apart from the entry-level Rallon E10 (where they are an optional upgrade). The Mountain Control MC32LTD wheels featured on the Rallon E-LTD use carbon rims, while the MC32TEAM variant uses aluminum ones.
Some Questions / Things We’re Curious About
(1) Orbea is notably talking about the new Rallon as a DH bike first and an Enduro one second. Is that just meant to highlight the fact that they’re now sponsoring the FMD DH team, and the fact that DH racing seems to be winning out over Enduro for the gravity racing spotlight, or does the Rallon feel more coherent as a DH bike than an Enduro one?
(2) The new Rallon’s suspension kinematics look like a big departure from those of the prior-generation bike. Just how differently (or not) does it ride than the bike it replaces, in the Enduro configuration?
(3) What about its performance as a DH bike? We’ve been experimenting with a few different DH configurations on Enduro frames of late, but does the Rallon feel more like a dedicated DH bike that can also work as an Enduro one, rather than the other way around?
(4) How big does the gap feel between the Occam LT and the Rallon Enduro in Orbea’s lineup? Will they offer something new to bridge it down the line?
Bottom Line (For Now)
We knew that Orbea was cooking up a DH race bike to support the FMD race team, but the fact that it’s the new Rallon, and is built to serve double duty as an Enduro bike, came as a surprise. By all appearances, the new Rallon is a big departure from its predecessor, and we’re excited to find out how it stacks up, both in its Enduro and DH configurations. We’ve got one on the way for review, so we’ll start finding out soon, and stay tuned for much more on the new Rallon as we go.
So hyped for this. Bike looks sick.