2025 Transition

Smuggler Carbon Eagle 90

Ten years ago, the Transition Smuggler was a burly short travel trailblazer. Does history repeat itself?

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Transition has a new version of the Smuggler out, a bike that really should have been called the Spur LT. Or perhaps the Spur Lunch Ride. Transition reckons it’s made a bike to sit neatly underneath the hard charging Sentinel enduro bike in its range, but really it’s much closer in ride feel and pace to the brilliant Spur, the best down-country mountain bike to date. Transition Smuggler need to know 130mm trail bike, with an option to boost it to 140 via a shock spacer 140mm fork, 29er wheels and carbon and alloy frame options Internal routing, headtube cable entry, chainstay protector, proportional chainstays New aggressive geometry, and increased progression through the shock Alloy build is £4,499 with SRAM NX, up to £8,999 for XO SRAM AXS Perhaps it’s not such a stretch from the Smuggler’s roots then, a bike that really launched the downcountry revolution for us. When I first tried it back in 2014 it was a game changer for me, with short 115mm suspension AND slack geometry, a combination that had never been tried before. “I love that bike Muldoon,” I remember telling bike test taoiseach Muldoon. It was a glimpse into the future, before the Smuggler quietly dropped out of the range. The world wasn’t ready. Later the wonderful Transition Spur appeared and repeated the experiment, only better. Transition kept the travel short (120mm travel but we measured it at 116mm, just like the old Smuggler), the geometry relaxed even further, and we saw a lightweight chassis and flex stay suspension that wouldn’t have felt out of place on an XC race bike.  The latest version of the Smuggler is like a beefed up Spur then, it gets 130mm travel and a bigger 140mm fork with 34mm stanchions so it can handle the descents with more aplomb. But the frame looks remarkably similar. You can also step up the travel on the Smuggler to 140mm and further differentiate it. There’s a 5mm reducer built into the Fox Float X shock to adjust the stroke length, keep the eye-to-eye length the same and thus keep the bike’s geometry unchanged. Smuggler frame and suspension The SRAM GX AXS-equipped bike I tested uses a carbon fibre frame, but there are alloy options that add around 1,500g to the weight and lop plenty off the price. The Smuggler still uses the same four-bar GiddyUp suspension design it always has, and there’s still a Horst-link pivot on the chainstay meaning it hasn’t nabbed the flex stay design from the Spur.  I’m actually quite surprised about that, given how well the Spur’s suspension worked, and how reliable flexstay suspension as a whole now is. Just look at Merida’s One-Sixty enduro bike if you want proof of that. There’s internal cable routing, which slides in right at the front on the head tube, and it snakes its way through the bike via tube-in-tube routing. Unfortunately it doesn’t work very well, at least on my demo bike, which produced a deafening rattle. I …Continue reading »

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The new Smuggler hits the sweet spot when it comes to travel, geometry, and capability.

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