RockShox SID forks might be the choice of weight fanatics when it comes to race forks, but the World Cup Reba proves that a bit of extra meat can mean extra speed.
It uses the same chunky lowers and legs as every other Reba, but it also has an ultra high tech 'Black Box' one-piece carbon fibre crown and steerer tube. This drops the weight to just over 1.53kg when chopped to fit one of our bikes - competitive for a 100mm travel race fork.
The fork tracks the trail and handles hits like a proper trail fork rather than twanging around or stumbling wide through corners. We were a bit nervous about the carbon top section, but we've hammered the fork for months and it's handled everything from evening singletrack thrashes to six-hour races and even the 188km Etape du Tour road event. Apart from a slight rattle when locked out on the handlebar remote, it got smoother the more we rode it.
Negative and positive pressure can be balanced to make the fork as active or stubborn as you want, and the release sensitivity of the Floodgate lockout is adjustable too. The only negative is that once you've put the big carbon-friendly steerer plug in, the fork is only a few grams lighter than the alloy topped but otherwise identical Reba Team.
