Just In: Trek Crockett 9 Disc

The Trek Crockett 9 Disc is an aluminium cyclocross race bike in a Shimano Ultegra build that’s priced at £2,200.

Cyclocross bikes come in two different types: you’ve got yer road-going crossers that are designed to put up with all-round winter commuting, urban thrashing, a bit of towpath bashing and what have you, and you have yer off-road crossers, designed for actually riding cyclocross. The Trek Crockett bikes fall within the latter category.

There are three Crockett bikes in the range, each of them built around a frame made from Trek’s 200 Series aluminium. 

The £1,250 Crockett 5 Disc opens the range, equipped with a mainly Shimano 105 groupset, Bontrager tubeless ready wheels, and Avid BB5 mechanical disc brakes. 

The Crockett 7, at £1,450, comes with a SRAM Force 1x groupset. In other words, it has a single chainring (40-tooth) and an 11-speed cassette (11-28-tooth). This model doesn’t have disc brakes, it has TRP RevoX Alloy cantis operating on Bontrager tubeless ready rims. 

The Crockett 9 Disc is the top-of the-range offering. The frame is built with an E2 tapered head tube meaning that although the upper bearing is 1 1/8in, the lower bearing is a chunky 1 1/2in, the idea being to add more cornering stiffness. The bottom bracket is BB86.5. It’s a wide, press-fit standard that’s also designed for stiffness, this time for efficient power transfer.

The cables run internally and you get discreet mudguard mounts if you do want to take the Crockett on the road.

Trek’s IsoSpeed fork is full carbon – the steerer, the crown, the legs and the dropouts, the lot. Speaking of the dropouts, you get a 15mm thru axle design on the front here. Trek reckons this makes for precise steering. The fork is designed to a shape that’s intended to provide compliance and smooth the ride. It’ll be interesting to see if we get that impression out on the trails.

Trek builds the Crockett to what it calls its Cross Geometry. We have the 58cm model here with a 57.0cm effective top tube, a 55.3cm seat tube (why don’t brands publish an effective seat tube measurement for bikes with a sloping top tube?), and a 17.6cm head tube. The stack height (the vertical distance from the centre of the bottom bracket to the top of the head tube) is 59.7cm and the reach (the horizontal distance between those points) is 39.1cm. That’s a cyclocross race setup, exactly the same as Trek uses for its top-end Boone carbon-fibre cross bikes.

The brakes are post-mount Shimano RS685 hydraulic discs working on 160mm rotors. They’re non-series (they don’t belong to a groupset), designed to be run with any of Shimano’s 11-speed mechanical groupsets: Dura-Ace, Ultegra and 105. 

In this case, Trek uses Shimano Ultegra derailleurs which we know to be top performers, Ultegra being Shimano’s second tier road groupset. 

Trek ditches Ultegra for the chainset, going for an FSA Energy Cyclocross instead. This comes with hollow aluminium crankarms and 46/36-tooth chainrings. 

The wheels are tubeless ready Affinity Comps from Trek’s in-house Bontrager brand. These are built with 26mm-deep 6061 aluminium alloy rims and have claimed weights of 765g (front) and 985g (rear). The tyres are from Bontrager too; they’re CX3 Team Issue in a 32mm width.

Nearly everything else is from Bontrager too, including the Race Lite IsoZone VR-CF handlebar. That CF doesn’t stand for carbon-fibre, this is a custom-butted 6066 alloy bar. The VR-CF is actually short for variable-radius compact flare and it refers to the shape of the drop. The lower sections flare outwards slightly to provide increased wrist clearance when you’re using them.

The drop is just 123mm – that kind of short drop has become the norm these days – and the bar comes with Bontrager’s integrated IsoZone foam pads, the idea being to absorb vibration as you ride. 

The seatpost is carbon-fibre and a skinny 27.2mm in diameter, which should help with the comfort, while the saddle is a Bontrager Paradigm R with hollow cromo rails.

Our complete bike – in a 58cm build, don’t forget – weighs in at 9.18kg (20.23lb).

Of the cyclocross bikes that we’ve reviewed here on road.cc lately, the closest in price to the Trek Crockett 9 Disc is the Specialized Crux Elite X1 at £2,500. Dave loved that bike. He said it is, “A simply brilliant cyclo-cross bike that provides really good handling, bags of pace and all the benefits that disc brakes bring to the party, all wrapped up in a bold looking package.” Told you he loved it.

The Specialized comes with a carbon-fibre frame and a SRAM Rival 1 drivetrain and, like the Trek, it’s race focused.

Liam has actually been shooting about the countryside on the Crockett for a while now so expect a full review very shortly, hopefully this Sunday (1 November).

In the meantime, get more info at www.trekbikes.com.