Juliana

Strega Carbon C Mountain Bike Frame - 2018 - Women's

The Strega must have been conjured from a cauldron full of rock gardens, rooty tree lines, gravity, and carbon fiber, with an engineer's finger or toe thrown in for good measure. Wicked-slack angles and bewitching suspension design are combined into a bike that's so capable it's spooky. The Juliana Strega Carbon C Mountain Bike Frame, aptly named after the Italian word for witch, may be able to fly down mountains with no hesitation, casting spells on riders every which way, but it's best if you don't burn it, it may feel bombproof, but we make no guarantees that this witch isn't flammable.

Diving deep into the dark of it, The Strega is not designed for just any woman who reaches for a mountain bike, it yearns for women who want to ride like a bat out of hell through the roughest terrain. The unwavering stability necessary for this kind of riding is achieved through an incredibly slack head tube angle, which is adjustable with the swap of a flip-chip on the linkage, so you can customize the ride from the High, enduro and trail hungry 65-degree head tube angle, to the downhill centric 64.5 degrees, which drops the bottom bracket and lengthens the wheelbase. We all hear about long and low geometry in mountain bikes so often that we might think someone may have hexed us, but the Strega is so slack, it's impossible not to comment on the length of the wheelbase. With just over a 47-inch between the hubs in a size Medium (low geometry setting), the Strega is incredibly long and stable, and the slackest women's specific bike currently on the market. When the long wheelbase is paired with short chainstays for a responsive rear end, and a seat tube angle that's even steeper than the Roubion at 74.5-degrees, you've got a long-travel bike that's still happy to be pedaled up steep climbs, so you're not cursed to a life of anything but shuttles and lift access riding.

The Strega's VPP suspension design takes some queues from the Santa Cruz V10 with its lower link location, but dives into territory that hasn't been on the market before, and it's done in such an aesthetically pleasing way. Nestled in the lower-link is the RockShox Super Deluxe R shock, with 170mm of suspension, centered within a tunnel of meticulously laid-up carbon fiber that arcs around it as if to worship it, capped with a fender in the back to shield it from mud spray and stray trail debris. The location of the shock at the lower link translates to a more linear shock rate with a quick responding and consistent ride that wants to track its way through rubble and roots. This shock placement marks an extreme departure from the suspensions of the Roubion, Furtado, and Joplin. The Super Deluxe R air shock was redesigned with increased bushing overlap for a smoother stroke to send it over chunder, and metric sizing to future-proof it, should you want to upgrade the rear suspension later down the road. The shock also received a women's specific tune, since we tend to weigh an average of 30 pounds less than the guys on the trails.

The Strega Carbon C uses Juliana's second-tier carbon, which hosts similar construction methods to their higher grade CC, with a different grade of material that adds a mere 250-280g to the frame, and saves big on money. The carbon is constructed using the same one-piece carbon layup technique as their CC level, with unidirectional carbon plies that wrap between the tubes so that the frame can absorb impacts more effectively, and a compressive bladder for applying outward pressure against the mold while carbon is curing to reduce resin pooling. The result is a bike that lures us in with its spellbinding aesthetics and captures our souls with the drive to fly down every mountain in sight on a bike so light that we may confuse it for a magic broomstick.