Competitive Cyclist

VENTANA EL TORO

It's a full suspension world now, and any conversation about mountain biking inevitably leads to engineering technobabble of things like linkages, travel lengths, and pivot points. On the rare occasion when the topic of hardtails comes up, many speak with a bit of reverence. Why? Given the relative simplicity of their design, there seems something pure about them.

If purity is what you're after, and what you want is the raw experience of mountain biking, stripped of all artifice, you choose a single-speed. No other style of bike is more reliant on the rider himself. What gets you down the trail is your courage and your cadence, and what dictates whether you look like a god or a dork are your impulses and instincts. The bike itself is almost secondary in comparison to your approach to riding it.

The Ventana El Toro is a salute to the cult of the single-speed. When built up, its lack of shifters, derailleurs, and cables makes it look technologically old-school. But you can rest assured that El Toro is manufactured with the same obsession with quality that you find in their most sophisticated full-suspension models. It features butted and multi-shaped 6061 aluminum tubes to give it surprising lightness and amazing strength. And El Toro's "Electric Sex" welds and gorgeous powder coating are trademark Ventana.

El Toro is built with an eccentric bottom bracket and standard vertical dropouts. The eccentric allows the chain length adjustments necessary for single-speed use and the vertical dropouts save a brake adjustment when you change your rear cog and can easily accommodate a standard Ventana derailleur hanger, so it's no one-trick pony. You can quickly turn it into geared bike, though it has no provision for a front derailleur cable stop. It would be an easy setup for 1x9 or 1x10 however. It has beefy International Standard disc brake mounts and S-Bend chainstays to provide superior braking performance and superb torsional rigidity.

The 26" wheeled Ventana El Toro requires a 27.2mm seatpost and is available stock in Electric Superdust or Cosmic Orange. Or for $150 and a few weeks, it can be finished in any of Ventana’s awesome colors – Electric Red Metallic, Electric Blue Metallic, Gloss Black, Grinch Green, Army Green, Cosmic Grey and Gloss White. It’s available in odd sizes between 13”-21”. And if you’d like to brand your bull, do so with custom or semi-custom geometry and custom colors. Either way, Ventana finishes the frame in style, with a handcrafted stainless steel headbadge proudly displaying the Ventana "V" with the year of their inception, 1988.

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2010 Ventana El Toro Pricing