Now that we're half way through 2009, 2010 product is being announced. Yes, the bike industry's shared calendar is that broken. This here is the updated RockShox SID World Cup, a development of the all-new SID that was launched in 2007.

There are two significant changes. First, there's a carbon fibre crown and steerer, a feature that was dropped from the designed SID WC for 2009 - RockShox wanted to put in more development and testing in the interests of strength and durability (and passing the stringent CEN test standards). World Cup racers have been using the BlackBox carbon crown/steerer for quite some time.

Clearly operating some kind of carbon-related "one in, one out" policy, RockShox has taken the magic blanketry out of the fork lowers - the current fork has a combination of magnesium and carbon fibre, the 2010 model is just magnesium. You still get the stiffness-enhancing Power Bulges, though.

Those changes drop 110g from the weight of the SID World Cup, bringing the new model in at 1,400g with no loss of stiffness. That compares well with rival XC race forks like Magura's Durin SL (1,360g), although DT Swiss's recently-announced XRC100 is significantly lighter at 1,250g.

The current SID has excellent bump-eating performance, and there are no big changes to the internals - the BlackBox Motion Control damper and Dual Air spring give you loads of tuning options. The SID World Cup comes with a PushLoc bar-mounted lockout lever and will be available with 80 or 100mm of travel.

No word on UK pricing yet, but forks generally have got frighteningly expensive and this is a high-end one - you're looking at $1,120 in the US, which on strict exchange rate terms would be £700, but we'd expect it to be a little more than that.