The chromoly MTB renaissance rumbles on, as new brand Cotic make ready to launch their Soul. Main man Cy Turner (Cy-Cotic - see what he's done there?) will be dropping by Bikemagic Villas later this week with a test bike for us to play with. It looks like an interesting beast. Cy's essentially making the bike he wants to ride and hoping that lots of other people want to ride it too.

So what's different about it? Well, it's a slightly more extreme take on the long-forked but non-jumpy hardtail theme. Plenty of hardtails are designed for 100mm travel forks these days, but the Soul pushes the boundary by being intended for 100mm at a minimum, with 125mm being better...

It's certainly not the first hardtail to take a fork on that scale. Planet X's Compo has been around for a while, but that goes for a short, very steep and aluminium approach while the Soul is a mix of Reynolds 853 (front) and 4130 (back) chromoly, long and only mildly steep.

Production frames will be an eminently reasonable £400 including Salsa seat QR, a neoprene chainstay protector and some frame protection stickers. They should be available in April, by which time we'll hopefully have managed to test it. In the meantime, more information can be gleaned from www.cotic.co.uk.