Starling In The Slipstream

Starling In The Slipstream

Anti-marketing marketing and design simplicity; Starling’s Twist is a British built single pivot mullet that can be either a 135mm trail bike or a 165mm enduro masher. It’s made out of steel. Is this a legit mountain bike, or an exercise in deviant steampunk romanticism?

Starling has been riding a wave of anti-establishment popularity for a few years now. The Bristol, UK-based brand founded by former aerospace engineer Joe McEwan started out with a no-fuss steel single pivot bike in 2015 that immediately won praise from Dirt’s Steve Jones and garnered a surge of positive reviews following that. This established the brand, and also gave rise to a highly partisan owner/fan base, rallying around the brand’s clarion call of “bikes that perform simply; bikes that simply perform.”

Knowing that Kool-Aid comes in many flavors, and having chugged down enough of the carbon fiber, multi-pivot, “our technology is more betterer than everyone else’s” over the years, I can appreciate the desire to drink something a little more easily digestible. Like choosing a Greyhound over a Long Island Ice Tea, to stretch a metaphor. Simplicity has its allure, for sure. But, simplicity itself is also a Kool-Aid flavor. So, I have been intrigued enough by the Starling brand Kool-Aid for long enough now to want a taste, but, like I mentioned, I’ve swallowed gallons of the stuff and am prone to suspicion about everything these days.

Nevertheless, when the opportunity to spend a month railing blown out turns on the latest version of a Starling Twist arose, I eagerly threw my Poc Tectal into the ring. I’m going to break the next part of this review into pieces that may not make total sense. First, I’m going to talk about the promise and premise behind the Twist (apologies for any confusion to people who read my earlier reference of a different bird - the Swift). Then I’m going to talk about my suspicions and biases, then I’m going to talk about how the bike rode.

Promise/Premise

This is the easy bit. The Twist (and all other Starling models, for that matter) is a dead nuts simple design; one pivot, two big bearings, mostly external cable routing, round steel tubes without any fancy shaping, one sort of bottle mount. The promise here is that most riders don’t need all the fluffy technology that they have been habituated to crave. In the words of Starling, this is “the perfect blend of raw speed and fun.” In travel and intent, the Twist jumps into a pretty heavily populated arena, but instead of boasting more sophisticated suspension kinematics or refined carbon fiber layup maps derived from painstaking hours of FEA, it slaps down simplicity as its welcome mat.

The Twist is an all steel, single pivot, mullet configured trail bike. Starling front triangles are Reynolds 853, filet brazed in Bristol by, as Joe puts it “One and a half frame builders. We did have two and a half, but one left, so now we are down to one and a half. The ‘half’ being a part time apprentice…” The Boost-spaced, cromoly rear triangles are TIG welded in Taiwan and have enough room to stuff a 2.8” tire in between the stays. There’s a big pair of brazed on plate gussets sandwiching the front of the top and down tubes, and a multi-holed shock mount on the downtube that also adds some reinforcement. The mount is designed so that riders can opt for either a 210x50mm shock to build the Twist in its 135mm travel “trail” configuration, or a 230x65mm unit for a 165mm travel “enduro” option using the same rear triangle. The front triangle is also the same as the 29” wheeled Murmur, so there is wheel-size adaptability available via swingarm swapping. The bike here, as tested, was ridden entirely in the 135mm “trail” mode.

This, the V3 Twist, is moderately tweaked from the prior model. Seat angle has been steepened a bit and the bottom bracket raised slightly. The head tube is beefier to alleviate ovalizing concerns when running big forks. Pivot bearings have been moved from the frame outboard into the swingarm for a stronger, less flexy structure, as well as a revised cast steel bottom bracket/pivot/whatchamajiggy, also in the interests of strength and flex resistance. And an aluminum sleeve has been added to the seat-tube to ward off sticking seatposts.

Geometry is acceptably new skool; a 65.3 degree head angle with a 78.3 degree seat angle, 435mm chainstays and a 485mm reach on this size large test bike. My tester came built with a RockShox Zeb fork set to 150mm, which probably slackens the geo numbers by about a half degree, and an EXT Storia coil shock. Starling recommends coil instead of air shocks, in spite of the design looking to be very linear or maybe even slightly falling rate. The pivot location is an evolution of what was once upon a time referred to as a “high forward” pivot – slightly above and in front of the bottom bracket, about inline with a 32-tooth chainring, very similar to the position pioneered by the Santa Cruz Tazmon then copied by just about everyone trying to make a single pivot suspension bike that pedaled well. There's a nifty little chain guide built into the swingarm just above the pivot. This is about as good as it gets for single pivot designs, offering a relatively stable pedaling kinematic with minimal pedal kickback.

Suspicion/Bias

Having been fed a steady diet of (carbon) fiber over the past several years, I have experienced ride quality ranging from whippy and loose to stiff as a plank with the wonderweave. So I do not ever expect that a carbon fiber bike will perform a certain way ahead of time. But I have grown accustomed to large diameter tubing and big, stiff looking junctions between shock and frame, along with impressive looking large chunks of forged aluminum holding those stout looking pieces of frame together. So, to my carbon accustomed eye, Starlings look underfed. Skinny tubes, spindly seat stays, itty bitty shock mounts, teeny tiny swingarm braces that look more decorative than functional; there’s no way that a bike put together in such a primitive fashion using centuries old technology can be expected to have any degree of modern structural integrity, right?

And a single pivot? With a coil shock? Come ON, this isn’t 1996. That shit won’t fly anymore.

And then to go and overfork it with a freakin’ ZEB? This is gonna be a noodly bike that basically just wags around randomly behind that brute of a fork, blowing through its rear travel while at the same time hanging up on every square edged bump uphill or down, and attempting to justify a rear triangle that flexes so hard the tire rubs as some sort of traction/comfort benefit. And it’s heavy, too. Probably gonna suck.

That roughly sums up my thinking at first glance.

Refutation/Ride

“You know what happens when you assume things, mister Ferrentino,” my old woodwork teacher Frank Campbell said as he towered over me, speaking in that tone of voice he used to so masterfully convey jovial affability and menace at the same time; “You make an ASS out of U and ME.” I think this particular in front-of-the-class dressing down had something to do with my erroneous assumption that wood lathes spun at similar speeds to metal lathes, but it might have had something to do with me assuming that he was perhaps mellowing in his stance on corporal punishment. Either way, he was fond of that saying. And caning people.

Speaking of caning, holy shit! This bike is fun!

Take almost all that stuff I said above about suspicions and bias and just flush it. I found myself regularly riding confidently into drops and jumps that normally cause me to check up or balk, and stuffing the Twist harder into turns than I’ve stuffed anything for a long while. As far as the alchemy of frame geometry and chassis feel is concerned, Joe has hit a sweet spot with this bike. It is easy to get up to speed on, and a whole mess of fun to ride.

It isn’t flexy, at least not in the way that bugs me. Flex that bugs me can best be described as “yaw” – where you can push the handlebars in one direction and your hips in the other and feel the bike come out of plane along its top tube, or where you can look down as you pedal hard uphill and watch the rear wheel come out of plane compared to the seat tube. All bikes exhibit some amount of yaw, and we all have our personal feelings about what is acceptable here, but I am not generally a fan of either. I am happy to report that the Twist is deceptively taut in each of these areas. The front end stays very nicely in line, with very little deflection evident between bars and saddle, nowhere near what I was expecting to find. The rear end exhibits a little bit of deflection when you wind up hard on a standing climb, but, again, nowhere near what I was expecting. I suspect this really nice frame feel is achieved by using tubing with relatively thick walls, aided by those plate gussets. As to how he achieves such a well-behaved rear triangle, I have no clue.

This bike corners like a fiend. It is ridiculously fun to come into turns too hot and just stuff it into place. It has a really nice front/rear balance and is super comfortable to jump. I am “of a certain age” where jumping in general kinda makes me nervous. The Twist is an awesome bandaid in this area. Line it up, squish into the face, pop! The great big Zeb fork doesn’t push the frame around in any noticeable way, although there is some difference between how the fork ramps up and the rear suspension doesn’t, but we will get into that downstream. Suffice to say, as far as “manners” and “handling” go, I’m really impressed.

Let’s differentiate “handling” from suspension though. With regard to smoothing out the bumps, this is still a single pivot bike. And there are limitations as well as compromises at work here. First, setup: I weigh 180 at the moment, ready to ride. I was running the Zeb at 65psi with one volume spacer, compression all the way open, rebound about 12 clicks out. The EXT had a 450lb spring on it, and I barely put any preload into it at all, basically just enough to stop the spring from rattling on the collar, for 14mm sag. Rebound was 5 clicks out from closed, low speed compression 8 clicks out, high speed compression 10 clicks out. I never used the lockout lever.

With the above setup, the Twist pedaled well on flat, had a nice firm platform that didn’t bob, was relatively stable even when standing climbing, but at the expense of buttery smooth small bump compliance. If I backed off both the compression circuits, I could get to that super smooth small bump state, but it came at a notable cost to pedaling behavior in the form of bob and a loss of efficiency, including more noticeable pedal kickback when powering through roots or chunder. I opted for leaving it firm. Given that the Storia EXT employs a hydraulic bottom out circuit, I never felt it bottom hard, but it definitely moved through its travel differently than the Zeb. Pulling the volume spacer out of the Zeb helped a bit in this regard. This is the bugbear of single pivot designs – they can be made to work really well at one end of the bump absorption spectrum or another, but it is difficult to get the full across the board performance that more complex linkage designs can achieve.

Buuuut, you only have to deal with two bearings. This is where the simplicity versus performance delta becomes very personal. For my part, I am plenty comfortable with a bike that maybe telegraphs a little more what is going on between the wheels and the ground if I don’t have to service a whole bunch of linkage components. I could live with this compromise. However, going back-to-back between the Twist and the similar-travel SB140 I’ve been testing, the difference is stark. The SB140 makes small stuff disappear, is completely indifferent to pedal inputs, and still ramps up beautifully when hitting things hard. It is a very big ask to expect similar compliance from a single pivot. It would be disingenuous to imply otherwise. But then again, you don’t need to spooge grease into your little Kashima dealiebobs every 20 hours on the Twist, because it doesn’t have any of that shit.

Who Are You?

Extrapolating ride characteristics out from the geezer zone that I call home, I’d say that the Twist will appeal to trail riders who like to carve turns, hit jumps, and have fun. People who hate futzing around with suspension settings and would prefer to just get on with riding will love it. Suspension performance purists will probably find the suspension behavior a bit “rustic.” Riders who have a daily diet of pedaly climbing chunder might struggle to hit the perfect setup. Really big riders who want to smash everything will probably want something more intentionally brawny. The Twist motors along just fine until the grade pitches up into the place where suffering happens. Then it doesn’t matter how steep the seat angle is; winching a 34 pound bike that has a little bit of pedal kickback in the rough uphill hurts a bit more than it will with other bikes. All of this is said with reference to riding the Twist in its shorter travel incarnation. At a wild guess, I’d say the longer travel version would still be a hoot to rip through a turn, would be a fair bit plusher everywhere, and might also be a bit more work to get up a hill.

There’s no smoke and mirrors at work here. What you see is pretty much what you get. 2100 USD gets you a mostly handbuilt frame that will make you feel like a hero in a lot of situations. In today's hyper inflated bike currency, this is almost working class, on-par with, say, a very fun and capable Marin Rift Zone Carbon. Way less expensive than the high-zoot dentist bikes, and also more attainable than any number of custom steel handbuilt hardtails. US distribution is handled by Traillabs, and they can serve up a whole range of suspension and build options that will either stretch or rapidly burn the dollars in your wallet.

It’s not perfect. Not much is in life. The suspension works well enough for me, but I am willing to acknowledge it favors simplicity at the expense of absolute performance and I can willingly accept a few compromises there. The sole waterbottle mount location kind of sucks. Some people love big curvy monocoques and internally routed cables and will think this looks a bit too primitive.

The Twist is a very simple but well thought out tool that does its job deceptively well. It is an absolute blast to get loose with; I honestly haven’t had this much fun on a bike in a long while. It handles far better than I expected, and is absolutely worthy of consideration as mid-travel trail ripper. It “feels” really good. The fact that it is made by people who you can argue with via email, out of a material that is repairable and recyclable, in a place that isn’t China, that matters to me. I hate internally routed cables , I am growing tired of bikes that make funny noises that get amplified by carvernous frame sections, and I am a sucker for filet brazing. This’ll do just fine.