2024 Transition Smuggler

The Littlest Sledgehammer

This is a review of the Transition Smuggler. My eyes were first opened to the “I didn’t think they could do that” potential of short travel bikes that punch above their weight by the aluminum Smuggler a year or two after it first appeared in 2014. Ten years ago it was a 115mm rear travel, category defying thug of a bike; long, slack, heavy, and completely unconcerned about what the XC-nerds were doing over on the bunny slopes. I loved it. And I also kinda hated it. Because, like every other Transition I ever rode, as well as most Devincis and a few Evils, I never really felt hardcore enough to justify owning the bike. It was built like a brick shithouse, in order to survive levels of abuse that I would never come close to dishing out. There was a ton of progressivity to the rear suspension, so even when running way more sag than recommended I would consider it a victory whenever I managed to use 75% of the travel. In short, I felt like the Smuggler was designed for someone way more rad than me.

So, here we are in 2024, reviewing the now carbon fiber framed, 130mm rear travel Smuggler. To cut to the chase, nothing has changed. I am still not rad enough.

Transition sent me an Espresso brown GX-AXS Smuggler in late June. Since then they have unveiled the new spec and colors for 2025. Geometry and frame construction is unchanged but some of the parts are notably different. So, the component spec on this bike I am reviewing here is obsolete. Buuuut, Transition is still selling the superseded Smugglers at some hefty discounts. F’rinstance, the GX-AXS bike I am reviewing here is currently available for 5399 USD, whereas the new version will ding you for $6499US. And, as it turns out, there are some important things to consider when it comes to choosing to save some dollars or spend for the new new. We will get into that in a bit here.

This is the bike that I have been riding for the past couple months. And this is the new bike. Geometry for either is the same:

By The Numbers

Transition were one of the early proponents of longnslack geo, and they refined it into their Speed Balanced Geometry some years back when they added shorter offset forks into the mix. A 65-degree head angle paired with a 78-degree seat angle and 485mm reach on a size large test bike is almost par for the course these days but make no mistake, this is still a long and rangy beast. The 1247mm wheelbase on my test Smuggler is 30mm longer than that of the SB120 I tested a while back, 37mm longer than the Trek Top Fuel that’s waiting in the wings, and 7mm longer than the unabashedly long Mondraker Raze. 35mm of bb drop paired with 440mm chainstays reinforce the notion that Transition were aiming to err on the side of stability while still courting some sense of playfulness.

The rear suspension is a Horst-Link 4-bar layout, with a high leverage rate and a whole mess of progression throughout the travel. Transition say the Smuggler is comfortable running air or coil shocks, and judging by how rampy it gets toward bottom out, I’d hazard a guess that they nailed that intention.

Big pivot hardware, a meaty carbon fiber upper link, and an angularity of design that doesn’t skimp on material implies that the Smuggler is holding true to the general Transition ethos of building bikes that live to be smashed. Tube in tube hose routing keeps things somewhat civilized when feeding cables through the frame, there’s a threaded bb shell with a built in ISCG mount, and a pair of mounts on the underside of the top tube can be utilized for whatever it is that people like to bolt to the underside of top tubes. There's no stash-spot in the downtube, and you won't find any flip chips anywhere on the frame. This is the way.

The Smuggler fills a hole between the flexstay 120mm travel Spur and the Horst-Linked 150mm Sentinel. In spite of a fair bit of the marketing language being about “playful” and “nimble” characteristics, the Smuggler leans assertively more toward the “smash with conviction” side of the trail market than the “XC-bike with extra travel” end of the spectrum. There are even a couple limit spacers inside the rear shock that can be easily removed to bump travel up to 140mm out back, which would play really well with something like a 150mm travel 36 up front.

Parts is Parts

Since SRAM GX-AXS drivetrains and brakes have been reviewed to death and are so ubiquitous in this price-tier, and doubly since the spec on this bike is now somewhat obsolete, do we really have to go into the details? Okaaaay, fine. Be that way.

Highlights: 210mm OneUp dropper post, Maxxis Dissector/Assegai tires, ODI Elite Flow lock-on grips, house brand ANVL stem and 800mm alloy bars.

Standard fare: SRAM GX-AXS Eagle Transmission, Code brakes (200mm rotor front, 180mm rotor rear). The wheels on this test bike are RaceFace Aeffect Rs, a functional but chunky 2000g wheelset. Bump absorption duties are handled by Fox Performance Elite bits; a 210x50mm Float X rear shock, and a 140mm travel GRIP2 damped fork.

Ch-ch-changes: The big differences (aside from ditching Orchid and Espresso colors in favor of Slab Grey or Juniper) between the bike I am riding and the new new can be summed up in the wheels and suspension components. The RaceFace wheels get supplanted with DT Swiss M1900s, something of a lateral move as far as weight is concerned but with some added brand/hub cachet maybe. On the suspension front, the new Smuggler has gone full SRAM; featuring a RockShox Super Deluxe Select+ rear shock paired with a 140mm travel Pike Select+ fork.

Handling

In terms of stability and cornering and balance, in most situations, the Smuggler is a gem. The chassis is stiff and well balanced, the upright seat angle makes it easy to get rider weight forward over the bars and the bike really responds well to assertive input. The wheels go where they are told, it holds a line beautifully, and maintains a good degree of responsiveness in spite of being looooong and stable. For a bike this stable, the Smuggler is surprisingly spry and easy to get moving. It is responsive to rider input, and so long as you don’t go trying to confuse it with any of the current crop of XC greyhounds, it even feels nimble and playful. It’s a very easy bike to feel like a hero on when it comes to descending anywhere, even when you’ve ventured into terrain far chunkier than the suspension was designed to cope with. It has the attitude of a bigger bike, without all the additional mass of one. I really, really, like the way this bike handles, with an asterisk.

Suspension

That asterisk comes to the fore when we start talking about the suspension. It’s really difficult to uncouple suspension performance from handling characteristics, because unless we are all riding super smooth trails all the time, suspension ultimately does impact how a bike handles. And when it came to the Smuggler’s suspension, I struggled to find a happy setup. I have a hypothesis about why, but it can wait. First, the nuts and bolts.

Transition recommends 26-32 % sag. The Fox Float X piggyback shock on the bike is a 210x50mm unit, so that equates to between 13-16mm of shaft travel. I experimented everywhere between 26 and around 40% sag while trying to figure out what I was feeling, and ultimately would always end up back around 26-28% as the best pedaling dynamic. Once sag got above 30%, the bike would start feeling boggy on climbs, in addition to catching pedals more in chundery going. Sure, it was more small bump compliant, but flipping the compression lever on the climbs became a necessity and the constant pedal smashing got old quick. It would still ramp up a ton when running sag in the 30-35% range, and I still never came anywhere near to bottoming it out.

So, since going uphill can’t be avoided, I would tune the suspension for that. Snappy climbing, responsive, relatively tractable, composed. Problem was, when I set the suspension up to be good for pedaling and climbing, it wasn’t so good everywhere else. Even with the compression damping wide open and the rebound set fastish, the Smuggler would start to deflect and pinball around in loose rocks, and there was an initial harshness that was always a little disconcerting. Combine that with a ton of ramp up at the end of stroke, and running in what felt like the “mo’ bettah pedaling” sag zone, I would rarely see more than 40mm of shaft travel being used no matter how hard I fudged my admittedly not very big jumps.

Fortunately, the handling was good enough that even with the rear suspension not really joining the party, the Smuggler’s stability was super impressive. The ride was a bit jarring, but stable. Cue up my inadequacies as a rider, and run smack into the Transition design ethos. Additionally, my feelings about the rear suspension behavior also applied to the front end.

Here’s what I suspect: Everyone at Transition is a certifiable badass on a bike. They can send it for days, they haul ass, and they hit shit real hard. They also live in Bellingham, and design bikes to be sent off big lips, dropped into duffy holes, and railed hard enough into packed berms that the tires peel off. And they design bikes that make riders happy in these conditions.

By contrast, my local riding is ledgy, rocky and loose. And, as already mentioned, I can’t huck worth a damn. But still, around here, suspension feel in the top half of the travel is critical; it determines climbing and cornering traction, and is a huge component of ride comfort and stability when it comes to railing rock gardens.

Eventually, I pulled the air can off the Float X and found out that there’s 7mm worth of volume spacer in there. According to Fox, that shows the compression ratio at around 3.08. Just to see what would happen, I ditched the big orange 6mm spacer, leaving just the 1mm puck in the can, dropping the compression ratio down to 2.56. Pumped everything back up, cycled the shock a few times, reset the sag at 14mm, then pulled the volume spacer out of the fork as well.

Now, my brain wants to believe that all this would do is change the ramp toward bottom out, and that the top half of the travel would still be about like it was before. In practice, what happened was the bike became much more responsive in the first half of the travel, the harshness in the high frequency small stuff and loose mid-size rock gardens went away, the bike started tracking like it meant business. Pedaling behavior was still very good, but there was some tradeoff in that the now much more active mid-stroke was generating more pedal strikes. But hey, at least I was able to use most of the travel, finally…

Ideally, I would like to play around with the volume spacer pucks some more and see where I end up. Prior to increasing the rear air volume, the suspension felt solidly outgunned in most aspects by a bike with 10mm less travel (the Yeti SB120), and far outclassed in every measure by a bike with the same rear travel (the Mondraker Raze). After the puckectomy, the Smuggler felt like it was at least back in the hunt as far as suspension behavior was concerned. Still not as sweet pedaling as the SB120, and still not as broadly Cadliiac smooth as the Raze, but much, much more friendly than it had been initially.

But then again… maybe if I wasn’t such a wuss, I would better appreciate the stock suspension.

The $1200 Question

So, you can buy a leftover Smuggler like the one I tested here for 5400 Freedom Units. OR, you can buy the new new version for 1100 more. What you’re really getting for that upgraded price are new suspension components. The Pike fork has 1mm thicker stanchions, and almost everybody I know is in love with the Super Deluxe shocks, but that may because they are riding the Ultimates. I haven’t ridden the new new, so I can’t say. But I can’t help wonder if the fact that EVERY single Smuggler kit is now RockShox across the board has something to do with how the Fox bits performed the year prior.

Here’s my take: The Transition Smuggler is as burly a bike as you’ll find in this travel range. Its burliness and capability in being able to go “above category” and remain intact is a huge part of its charm, but is also maybe its biggest flaw. There’s not a ton of gentle finesse on tap when comparing apples to apples with the competition. And, when going apples to apples, there are other bikes out there at the moment with suspension that feels more refined and more capable across a broader range of use, right out of the box. There are also some hiccup aspects in terms of how the hoses route through the swingarm and into the frame, or how the rocker link sits kinda wide and will likely bug knee-in pedalers.

All that said, I rode this thing all over the Colorado high country, rode it in the deserts of Utah and Nevada, took it up and rode it in Bellingham and North Van, spent a week using it as a course marking donkey at the Breck Epic, and did my best to ride it hard and put it away wet every time. Even though I already posited that this is a bike suited for rad-getters and meat-huckers, I really got comfortable riding the Smuggler everywhere. It is a very easy bike to get along with. I just wished the suspension was a little bit more Goldilocks juuuuuust riiiiight.

It’s a tricky proposition. The Smuggler will, as it always has, totally appeal to Those Who Huck Their Meat. It offers a level of fun that is often harder to find in longer travel bikes. At $6500, (8900 CAD) the new new is ballpark competitively priced - $400 less than GX-AXS Ibis Ripley, 10mm more travel and $400 less than a Santa Cruz Tallboy, $800 less and 10mm less travel than a GX Yeti SB140. What it lacks in sophistication, the Smuggler makes up in super composed handling and a sense of balance that invites having fun and exploring edges.

I’m dying to know how this thing behaves with a 150mm 36 and a coil shock. At 5400 bones, one of these leftovers could be a worthy experiment.

Transition Smuggler